I grabbed some patches from http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/linuxppc/list to put together a first efika-patches-2.6.23. It applies and compiles. If you're curious if it actually works as well, well so am I. Feel free to try. I'll give it a try later, but since I've managed to damage my efika, I can't test the ata part and who knows what else is fooked. efika-2.6.23.tar.bz2 is the compiled kernel + modules and the kernel config file used. That kernel contains the pax and grsecurity patches for 2.6.23 too btw, so don't be suprised if your log files fill up with grsec messages ;-p

Things are moving very slowly at the moment. Gentoo is taking more time lately and that may increase soon once we get busy with the 2007.1 release. What certainly didn't help either was that my efika seems to have suffered an accident. I'm not sure what happened, but it seems some wallop of unintended power has played havoc with the ata controller. It can't access either harddisk or usb media anymore. Fortunately netbooting still works, but not being able to use usb media is a pain.

The 2.6.23 kernel was released recently, but it seems it will still need a number of patches for the efika. So, it seems we're not done with efika-sources yet. I'll update it as soon as I think I have a reasonably complete set of patches.

Now this is a pretty darn good idea. Of course one would want an efika there instead of a via c7 :-)

Unfortunately I'm not nearly making as much headway as I would have liked. uClibc is being rather stallwart. Catalyst however is a great tool, powerful and flexible. I've managed to create stage1/2/3 tarballs, but haven't been able to build a uClibc based installcd yet. A number of packages need either locales support in uClibc (which should be doable) or need functions that uClibc doesn't implement yet. Once I've sort of sorted that out and are comfortable enough with catalyst I'll need to dig into the gnap scripts to see what needs to be done there.

What we do have now is a 2.6.22.1 kernel that includes quite a bit of efika patches and I've managed to cobble together a usb stick that will boot into a gentoo installcd environment. So some progress of a sorts at least. Hopefully this will be of use to people.

As a first step in getting a hardened system for the efika I've applied some patches from the hardened-patches collection to the efika-sources from the efika overlay. As a result I now have a kernel running on the efika with pax and grsec enhancements.

I'll see if I can get humpback to include those patches in the efika-sources. If not, I'll put up an alternative efika-patches tarball and some documentation. Once the efika patches are included in the mainline kernel, simply using hardened-sources should suffice.

Efika is here!
And it boots. Yay once more!

I tried booting from an usb stick, but so far those efforts have not been succesful. Netboot works just fine though. I've ordered a new small psu, since the one I'm currently using is both far too large to fit in the enclosure I intend to use (a cdrom drive enclosure from which the cdrom mechanism has been evicted) and it is just too damn noisy. I've also ordered a 2.5" HD for it.

I'm currently trying to make sense of the gnap scripts and catalyst. gnap as is, is not ready for ppc as it lists some dependancies that don't make sense for ppc (syslinux for example).

I'll need to look into the embedded stage3 for ppc too to see if I can use that to get started. That stage file is not build with a hardened toolchain though, which I would like for the final gnap core. The gentoo-hardened team has been very busy with getting glibc-2.4 and gcc-4.1 ready for hardened. uclibc should be ready too, so I'll give that a go soon. Things are looking good there.

Yay! My project was approved. :)

I'm curious which version will be shipped to me. The basic goals can be achieved with the fpga less version, but an fgpa would be quite interesting.

VIA Epia boards now come with hardware AES encryption and random number generation. The fpga based efika would make similar functionality possible. And I've read some interesting stuff on spam filtering and virus detection using fpga's.

Well, wait and see. It's still almost a month before the boards will be shipped if I understand things correctly.
In the meantime I'll look around for a nice psu and/or case and other pieces of hardware that may come in handy in this project.