2.6 support for MPC8541(e)

[jbi130 at yahoo.com]

I've recently received a GDA PCI-G8400 evaluation board with an
MPC8541E.  It came with u-boot 1.1.2 and a 2.4.27 kernel.

Our hopes are to get a 2.6 kernel running on this device so it is in
sync with out MPC8248 based boards.

What is the status of the support for these chips?  When I enable
CONFIG_SERIAL_TEXT_DEBUG I'm able to get some output, it seems to die
when initializing openpic.  There also appears to be issues with the
serial console as I'm not getting printk output at all, and I think I
should be by the time start_kernel is entered.

My current 2.6.12 builds use the MPC8540_ADS configs as a base.  The
2.4 that was received with the board does as well.

For now I'm not concerned with the 'E' part.  My main job is to
actually add support for the security engine, but I'd like to get 2.6
up and running first.  Yes, this is my first jump into machine
specific code..

Thanks.