I got myself a nell sbus-pcmcia card last week. At first i made a 
crosscompiled kernel on my x86, dmesg sees it as
nell0 at sbus0 slot 1 offset 0x0 level 4 (ipl 5) level 7 (ipl 9): rev 1
so I went to try things out, and the first thing i noticed was how slow 
my machine was (ok, it is an IPC but it was MUCH slower than with the 
generic kernel). Ok my first idea was that crosscompiling does some 
crazy stuff, and went to a friend of mine with a ss5 and compiled my 
kernel there with options
options	WI_AT_BIGENDIAN_BUS_HACK
wi*	at pcmcia? function ?
and audio commented out there. And when I tried it, the same thing, 
machine is slow as hell, sshd starts over 2 times slower than before. 
Then I tried to remove the sbus card itself, and there it was, machine 
booted with the new kernel (with nell support) and was just as fast as 
with the generic kernel. So even when the pcmcia has nothing plugged 
into it it slows the system down. When running generic kernel with no 
nell0 support but the card in the sun, it is still as fast as before.
Am I the only one getting this kind of slowing down with a sbus-pcmcia 
card inserted (even if it has nothing plugged into it, sure it works, 
even tried my wireless card in it, but the system is slow, and makes 
random cores).
Any ideas how to make it faster, or do I now have to choose between a 
normal system or a system with wireless support (love to walk around the 
  appartement with my laptop and have net) but is slow as hell?

Olev