This brings up a place where I can learn something - what's the relationship between Gentoo and Debian with regards to m68k? How much does one take from the other? Is it that Debian's doing the best job of maintaining diffs for the Linux kernel on m68k? Are parts of the base OS taken from Debian for Gentoo? Or the toolchain?
I bootstrapped my Gentoo effort from RedHat 5.2 back in the days, so no Debian involved there. On the mac I booted from a Debian image, partitioned up disk, made filesystems, created directory, mounted new filesystem to that directory, untared the basic packages, chroot into new root, found stuff missing, untared some more basic packages till I think I had it all working ok in the chroot. After that it was time for booting with new partition as root, which actually went fine, and my system was up with my Gentoo packages, and I could continue from there, leaving the debian image behind.
Most, if not all, m68k kernel devs use Debian. I know Geert Uytterhoeven had OpenWRT going for a while, but that was more as a test than anything else, and probably only in aranym, not sure. But the kernel sources are maintained outside debian, Geert Uytterhoeven is chief maintainer for the m68k git tree. All I have is portage ebuild that pull sources from him to build the m68k kernel source tree.
I have three kernels I compile, one for Aranym, one for the A1200 machines and one for the Mac Quadra 910, each in their own directory, and I do all the work on Aranym:
aranym /usr/src # ls -ld linux-2.6.30-rc6*
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 2009-06-03 12:43 linux-2.6.30-rc6-m68k
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 2009-06-08 03:21 linux-2.6.30-rc6-m68k-amiga
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 2009-06-08 02:21 linux-2.6.30-rc6-m68k-atari
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 2009-06-08 03:50 linux-2.6.30-rc6-m68k-mac
The directory without any extension is the one from my m68k-sources package, and after that one is emerged, I copy it out to ..-amiga, ..-atari and ..-mac (atari being aranym), copy in .config from /etc/kernels/kernel-config-m68k-2.6.*-{amiga,atari,mac} respectively, run "make oldconfig" in each directory to settle new config entries, symlink /usr/src/linux to the one I want to build and use Gentoo's "genkernel --no-clean" to build the kernel and modules, which I then afterwards tar together and copy over to the machines where they will be used.
Btw - I read now in the debian-m68k list about toolchain being ready with NPTL/TLS support for m68k in upcoming releases - great news!