[ARMedslack] A few questions on kirkwood initrd

[Tyler T]

If any of you wanted a happy ending, or at least closure,  here it is:

My serial cable finally arrived but I still could not get the kernel
to boot. My first false start was loading the kernel to the same
location as on the SheevaPlug, 0x8000000, which put the kernel beyond
the DockStar's 128MB of installed RAM, which means Stuart correctly
diagnosed my issue. With the u-Boot load address altered, I still got
errors though until I tried an uncompressed kernel -- and now
Armedslack 13.1 is installing as I speak! Here are my u-Boot commands
for the installer:

setenv arcNumber 2097
setenv mainlineLinux yes
setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/ram rw
usb start
fatload usb 0:1 0x1800000 uinitrd-kirkwood-installer
fatload usb 0:1 0x6000000 uImage-kirkwood
bootm 0x6000000 0x1800000

The aforementioned "mkimage Load Address 00008000" turns out to work
fine, as I assume this is actually an offset from whereever the kernel
got loaded by u-Boot.

I even got the stock, unaltered initrd to boot though of course I had
to recompile the kernel to get an uncompressed version of it (maybe
the compressed Armedslack kernel could be decompressed, but I don't
know how).

I'm now using the patched u-Boot from
http://jeff.doozan.com/debian/uboot/ installed to mtd3 and chainloaded
from the stock crippled u-Boot. The PlugApps bootloader I mentioned
earlier was quite limited (no initrd or 'saveenv') so once this
fully-functional u-Boot became available (thanks Jeff!), there was no
reason to use the PlugApps' and no reason to lump the kernel and
initrd into a single file as I had originally envisioned.

Though I am using a serial cable, it's theoretically possible to do
this without the serial cable by using the fw_envset commands to alter
the mtd3 u-Boot from within the DockStar' stock Linux install in NAND.
Though the armedslack installer initrd startup scripts look like they
should launch dhcpcd and dropbear, neither actually happens on bootup
so I still had to run those commands via serial. If this were fixed,
then no serial cable would be necessary and the install could be
carried out purely via SSH.

Anyway, I think I may be the first to boot Slackware on this hardware
platform, which is kind of cool. :) Thanks again for the help Stuart
and Andrzej!