With kernel 2.6.16 several things changed in PowerPC-land. The kernel-maintainers decided to merge the ppc32 and ppc64 architectures into powerpc. That gave us some headaches, because a lot of the Makefiles changed as well.
Since March I had problems to build a kernel with an included initramfs for the Pegasos (because an external initramfs could not be loaded). In the past I used the target make zImage.initrd, but this failed now with genkernel. Today I finally found some time to look into that problem again, as I need a proper genkernel for release-building. I though I had to touch Makefiles and rewrite a couple of the kernel-build system… But in the end I could fix this problem with a simple two-liner-patch in genkernel, as only two pathes needed to be changed.
I tested the patch in Bug 141153 with the Pegasos at home and added the 2006.0-splashimage into the initrd. Now I have a nice bootsplash during the rare reboots 🙂
The other result was a working test-CD for the upcoming 2006.1 release. Unfortunately I can’t test the Apple-part, as I don’t own a working Apple any more. So I have to rely on other devs or release-testers (we need more of them!). And testing with qemu isn’t possible. It dies shortly after the kernel has been loaded…
“But in the end I could fix this problem with a simple two-liner-patch in genkernel, as only two pathes needed to be changed.”
The simplest solutions are often the best ones.