Hi Alex,
I couldn't help but notice you have a VIA southbridge. I'm currently working on de-duplicating SMBus code, and also have a VIA chipset handy. I see the SMBus of the 8235 is hellishly similar to the VX900 I'm working on. I have a patch which adds a generic SMBus implementation for VIA chipstes here:
http://review.coreboot.org/#/c/144/
If you have the time and patience, could I ask you to pull that patch and mess with the 8235 early_smbus.c and Makefile.inc to take advantage of that code?
I'll have a look at it.
Marius