>Because we needed a FreeBSD machine to do some compilation on, I
>installed it (FreeBSD 2.2.7 again) on another slow machine: CPU: AMD
>Am5x86 Write-Back (486-class CPU), "pentium-75 rating" with 16M ram. The
>performance of this is really horrible: 20 K/s at best (using the same
>test file). I fear NetBSD wouldn't do any better here.

Sounds like a driver problem -- maybe a missing or late interrupt.
I dont know enough to diagnose it further.



>[1] The NetBSD install procedure is REALLY a disaster in this case.
>There was endless confusion about partition ids, BIOS and fdisk
>geometries, and disklabels. Somehow, during the many retried installation
>attempts, the NetBSD disklabel must have overwritten the FreeBSD
>disklabel. I thought both were supposed to be contained inside their own
>fdisk partition, but apparently not. In effect, the FreeBSD installation
>on that machine is now toasted, since I didn't have a hardcopy of its
>disklabel.

As of 1.3.x, NetbSD and FreeBSD use the same MBR partition-ID to mark
their MBR partitions ("slices").  Trying to install 1.3.2 onto the
same disk as FreeBSd is going to lose.  NetBSD-current assigns a new ID.