I ended up booting my mini kernel off of cd for diskless boots.
I may have to do that. Any particular notes on creating a CD for
the purpose?
IIRC, you can use a 9660 filesystem with ofwboot.xcf and a kernel,
Turns out this works, in the sense that I can boot. It doesn't work,
though, in the sense that I can't use the resulting boot, because it
assumes the console keyboard is ADB (which it isn't; the iMac doesn't
have ADB as far as I can tell from looking at the connectors - the
keyboard is USB) and infinite-loops prompting for the root device
type.
I'm now building a kernel configured "root on gem0 type nfs", but I
don't expect that to fix the keyboard issue. Just to keep things
interesting, my only coaster toaster is at home and the iMac is at my
gf's, so my test turnaround time is a week.
I'm going to be looking into the code behind this, of course, but if
anyone has any suggestions in the meantime....