Chuck suggested "sync" after copying ufsboot to root, before doing
installboot. That fixed my installboot problem. Silly me - I expected the
bits to be there...

Perhaps installboot should check for this condition (after all, it did
dectect that there was nothing on the disk), call sync(2), and wait for 5
seconds before attempting another pass.

w.r.t. disk performance, NetBSD is almost exactly 1 second slower than
SunOS 4.1.1; I did a 200 count of 50Kbytes (10 MB) read off the exact same
raw disk (a SCSI-1 Micropolis 600MB thing) ten times in succession on a
quiescent system; SunOS did this in 13 seconds, and NetBSD in 14. If we are
trusting of the clock mechanisms in both systems, it implies that we still
have a little cleanup to do in the driver path. On the other hand, this is
a vast improvement over the previous state of affairs - congratulations are
in order to the team responsible.

Erik Fair