Hi Oliver, You wrote:
I am now ready I think to start giving coreboot a whirl on this thing. Though I still wonder, if the bios can boot the kernel from the IDE 'drive', I assume coreboot will equally be able to boot it; but if recent kernels refuse to use the disk, I may end up being screwed anyway :S.
As i was trying to explain before, there is nothing wrong with the hardware or the way the IDE port is connected. The only problem is the stock bios witch is initializing the IDE port of the CS5536 as flash port.(that gives troubles if you are using a real IDE harddisk) When you use coreboot you can enable or disable flash_enable. Normaly it is disabled so you can use IDE.(But for your flash drive i think you want flash enabled) With coreboot you can use a normal recent kernel with the appropriate drivers.
Succes,Nils