I finally got a rootfs working with the kernel tonight.  It's a minimal rootfs built with buildroot and busybox but it boots up to a shell prompt and does just enough work to make sure ps displays the process list.  Whoopeeeee!!!

Now, don't get crazy here.  This is just booting to a shell prompt on the serial port.  I haven't gotten s-video output working – I haven't even tried to do that yet.  But this working build system is now in cvs.  Now it's time to build on that stable base of xcc, u-boot, kernel and rootfs.  Oh, and there is no initrd required.  That may work (and for grins I'll check if it does work later this week)  but with the kernel able to boot directly from the SD I don't see any reason to keep using it.