Monday will see the release of an *INSTALLABLE* efika.forth making some of this a lot easier.

It will completely hijack your nvramrc by loading and storing the new efika.forth script. At that point you can (and should) run kernels which do not replace parts of the device-tree during bootup/prom fixup.

Detection of whether you have the correct device tree or not will be done by way of the /openprom "built-on" property. I did think of making a new property for the patch, but then decided against it. Checking the built-on property is your best way to determine firmware version, and allows Linux (and users) to determine what they are running based on a simple integer number.

Do you guys mind working on a patchset (including Jon's fix, possibly some others) which goes with it, so we can roll it up for Gentoo, SuSE and Fedora?

I can provide .configs/binaries for any linux kernel with optimized configuration for specific purboses if you need. With default genkernel efika will be slow to boot and use. I dont have efika system but here is a /boot partition of my Pegasos2 gentoo installation. It has config file for Linux kernel version: 2.6.23 and two binaries. zImage with support for ATi Radeon 9250 as framebuffer and for interated via soundcard. zImage_nvidia has NVidia Riva framebuffer support and GeForce as well. I have tested that NVidia cards work well with that one. No modules are needed for those kernels but support is enabled if you need extra ones so you can configure sources with config and make needed. Binaries are built from vanilla kernel which is avaible from http://kernel.org .
http://xnet.fi/powerdev.org/boot.tar.bz2
For DRI use your distros provided modules or compile it yourself from the tree as module.

The point is to improve the Efika support..

To improve and devel efika kernels i would need equipment but there is no stores to buy in finland afaik. *sorry* if i miss topiced that pegasos2 kernel thing.

It's not that it's not useful, but the problem is not really anymore "how can I build my own kernel" as the actual code in the kernel not being of a terribly high quality.

We need more kernel/driver authors and skilled coders, that is for sure..

I dont qualify that skilled coder but i could maintain efika specific kernel as I have very experience with linux kernel design and configuration.

i tryed to switch from kernel 2.6.23 to 2.6.26.5, i made it out of "oldconfig".

basicly i have 2 issues:
1. the new kernel is about 4.4MB big
2. it want boot:
ok boot ide:0 zImage14
zImage starting: loaded at 0x00400000 (sp: 0x017ffd50)
Allocating 0xc0366b54 bytes for kernel ...
OF version = 'EFIKA5K2,1.3'
gunzipping (0xffffffff <- 0x00407000:0x0087fd22)...

than crash

the working kernel echos this:
gunzipping (0x01800000 <- 0x00407000:0x0052c651)...done 0x2710ac bytes
and boot..
any ideas?

You need to update binutils to 2.18 or higher.

using gcc 4.1.1 and (now) binutils 2.18_r3.. same problem, start building new gcc... will it help?

you need to check your .config file.
make oldconfig it's not enough, there are a lot of changes from 2.6.23.x to 2.6.26.x linux kernels.