console startup

I have a PPC 8241 board and Montavista's latest 2.6 embedded kernel. It
is for an 9272 board so the .config *almost* makes sense. I am having
trouble getting the console up on the serial port and am searching for
a few ideas.

There is a "progress" routine in gen550_dgb.c that does display some
modest serial strings and it works. I can see after the kernel starts
these few progress messages but none of the normal printk stuff
beginning with the following from the 2.4 Montavista kernel.

Linux version 2.4.17-d30 (buildmgr@swmpu) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315
(release/MontaVista)) #30 Thu Aug 10 19:07:44 PDT 2006
On node 0 totalpages: 16128
zone(0): 16128 pages.
zone(1): 0 pages.
zone(2): 0 pages.
Kernel command line: root=/dev/mtdblock0
ip19%2.168.56.190:192.168.56.44:192.168.50.2:255.255.255.0:hn0000000053300063:eth0:off
OpenPIC Version 1.2 (1 CPUs and 138 IRQ sources) at fc040000
time_init: decrementer frequency = 25.000000 MHz
Calibrating delay loop... 133.12 BogoMIPS
Memory: 61608k available (1288k kernel code, 468k data, 72k init, 0k
highmem)
Dentry-cache hash table entries: 8192 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)

I have traced with an ICE through console_init in start_kernel and it
looks reasonable, but yet the console never starts. And of course,
being a new kernel, I need to see those messages to get things setup
correctly.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Charles