Hello,

I had a 9500 with netbsd 2-0 installed on a second hard disk. Using
system variables I could reprogram outtput-device and input-device
seamlessy from macos so that at reboot OF would stop at OF prompt and
"boot" booted NetBSD.
NetBSD would work acceptably.  "ping -f" to another box would loose
almost 40% of the packets, but otherwise network performance was
acceptable, file transfers over 10Mbit would go to about 800-1000KBytes.
X didn't work, maybe because I don't have a standard video card (MGA).

I got a 9600, which should be faster, but afaik quite similar!
It has even the same OF version. I have 9.0 OS on one disk instead of
8.6, but the remaining setup is quite similar, teh video is the standard
mach64 ATI.

I simply transferred the HD with NetBSD form one computer to the other.
Having a generic kernel, I thought it should work. Shouldn't it ?
Keyboard, ethernet cable, monitor are the same, I almost swapped the
computers.

But I have a lot of problems I wasn't able to solve yet.

- OF acts stupidly and falls alwas to serial console! Annoying, to have
always a TE attached to the seral console.
output-device and input-device are correctly written inside nvram, as
"printenv" shows.
In fact making printenv and using those parameters with
" screen" output
" kbd" input

works. SO I don't understand what could go wrong...

Once I set them manually I have NetBSD booting

I can confirm the discussion going on here. I am sure I have a 604e
processor, while it is recognized as 604ev.

But the problem is the sluggish performance.
Ping -f to another host fails even a 50% of packets, but contrary to the
9500, transferring files over the lan is exceedingly slow (4Kbztes(sec)
and telnet is unusable. (Under macos 9 I get normal net performances).
Yesterday I got kernelmesasges sayng interrupts were lost on mesh and
that DMA was reset, today I could't reproduce that, but I had a shorter
uptime.

The second HD is internal, so It should't be attached to the mesh
controller? The external chain is empty. I thought then about Ethernet.
I have a digital 10/100 card, tried the same setup but got the same
problems...

So I am quite surprised, 9500 and 9600 should be quite similar...

Help appreciated :)

-Riccardo