Sean-Paul Rees wrote:
> I have an LC III running NetBSD/mac68k, and I recently reinstalled NetBSD
> to fix a major screw up that I made. Anyway, I've noticed that it takes
> quite a long time to install.
> 
> My LC III has a 540MB Internal Quantum SCSI drive (pulled out of a
> PowerMac 6100), and 12M of RAM. I am installing over an appletalk
> share on my FreeBSD/i386 server. It takes a good hour just to get base.tgz
> installed. I am running at 10baseT, and my other machine on my personal
> subnet takes anywhere from 530kB/sec to 730kB/sec (seems a bit slow
> today.)
> 
> Anyway, I'd appreciate some insight on why it takes so long.

2 things:

1) you're running over appletalk...that will certainly add a bit of
   overhead to the process
2) you're installing from macos.  the scsi interface used by the
   installer utility is pretty damn slow

fortunately, we should have a nice shiny and new sysinst for mac68k before
too much longer (once i get the rest of the kinks worked out of bob's code
:-) and (provided that the distribution sets are on a usable medium)
sysinst is quite a bit faster.  it's really quite cool, actually.  of
course, the curses-based interface has a tendency to hang while trying to
newfs the 3rd or 4th partition, but hopefully i'll get that figured out
before too much longer...

later.

colin