I finally found some time to devote to hacking on the DG834G. Given that it seems the bootloader checksums almost the entire flash on each boot a writeable flash file system doesn't seem to be an easy option. This rules out vanilla OpenWRT unfortunately, which is a shame given the AR7Port. However as I'm familiar with OpenEmbedded (which seems to be non working at present, but is behind OpenZaurus which I run on my C3000) I decided to have a look at getting that going. So now I have an image that boots, creates a ramfs for /, pivotroots the flash round to /media/realroot, creates a bunch of symlinks and should give me a basic filesystem to play with.

Except it's not very happy, producing INIT: PANIC: segmentation violation! sleeping for 30 seconds. messages. Booting to just /bin/sh works fine, but various things won't run. I'm currently blaming this on the fact I haven't changed the default Netgear kernel from 2.4.17, so the next course of action is probably to use an OpenWRT based kernel and see how that goes.