[ltp] Building kernel for 750P

[Chris Schumann]

Hello all, I have gentoo installed from stage1 on my 750P. Gawd that took a
long time. (bootstrap.sh took 11.6 days and emerge system took 6.4 days.)
The worst part is that the thing doesn't work.

The first time I built the kernel, I didn't pay a lot of attention to what
options I set. It turns out the ASCII native language is disabled by
default, so I couldn't type a blasted thing at either the login prompt, or
at the shell if I appended single to the kernel options. Editing in grub
works just fine, so I know the keyboard is good.

Anyway, I set options more carefully and found a bug that everyone already
knows about in the kernel. If you have PNP set, but PCI disabled, you can't
build a kernel. (The 750 has no usb, pci, IR or scsi. I'm not actually
really sure it has PNP.) I hand applied two patches (one deleted one line in
each of three files, the other defined a null function
pcibios_penalize_isa_irq), and now I get a kernel panic.

Since I'm kind of new at building kernels, I would appreciate hints on how
to proceed.

I would like to build the right kernel that doesn't panic... but there are
bugs in the source. So should I genkernel? (Not my favorite option.)

Should I try enabling PCI? (And have the kernel build take 20 hours)

Should I hack more source? (And still maybe not have a booting machine)

Any other suggestions?

Many thanks,
Chris Schumann