This is a great thread, it clarifies a lot of issues; I had no idea 
about a lot of these things. Some points of interest to me (aggregating 
several messages):

On Nov 18, 2004 Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> 1) hardware support is limited. My 8200 mac is not supported, my pb1400
> either. The only viable box I found is my 9500.
> workaround: get another box...
> solution: as far as the ppc601 concerns, someone had success on rs6k
> machines.

Do you have pointers to any messages? How much success did they have?

On Nov 18, 2004 Tim Kelly wrote:

> I've got a 7200 here, which is a ppc601. I could probably convince my
> wife to let me...borrow... it for a bit, but we also have to ask
> ourselves how far back in hardware do we want to support?

Well, I think a lot of NetBSD users would say as far back as possible 
:) We have VAX and 68K, which are much older than PPC601. Also, 
consider that 601 Macs have only two choices of operating system: MacOS 
7.5-9 and MkLinux, both of which have significant limitations.

On Nov 18, 2004 Chris Tribo wrote:

> I've seen posts that 601 support was integrated and working, hopefully 
> its just a matter of someone stealing a 7200, 8200 or 7300 to test it. 
> If it works then tell the mac68k people so they can get those PPC 
> accelerator cards to do something useful :) I don't know if it's 
> complete, only in current or what.

Where does this information come from? Can you point me to list posts?

I've been trying to find out what is happening with 601 support, who is 
working on it, and where things stand. I even have some hardware for 
testing available. I was considering jumping in myself, but I fear I 
don't have the time, experience, strength, intelligence, wisdom, 
dexterity, mana, etc. to do that right now. But I can certainly test.

On Nov 18, 2004 Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> 3. Ethernet troubles. Onboard mc0 is essentially unusable
> workaround: get another supported ethernet card (no, don't get a RTK
> that one works bad under  NetBSD too)

What is the problem with rtk? I couldn't find PR's detailing specific 
problems. I've had some troubles with these cards myself, specifically 
packet loss rates of about 5% when connected to 10baseT link (as 
opposed to 100baseT).