Getting the machine to the point where everything appears to boot this far is actually by no means any kind of completion of the first steps of a porting project. It tends to be the point at which you finally appreciate the real problems and the scale of work remaining.
There are numerous pieces of hardware in an Apple Macintosh and while it is possible to ignore them trying to get to the initial panic about the root filing system I was going to have to fill at least some of them in to go any further.
The most important items to fill in where those that dealt with the most basic system resources - interrupts, memory and the I/O busses. The interrupts and several I/O subsystems are handled by a pair of 6522 VIA chips, 8bit controllers from the stone age. These chips themselves are documented and their locations were known even if some of the connections to their I/O pins were a mystery. A certain amount of mapping work and other detective information showed that the VIA chips provided the all important system timer ticks, handled the keyboard at an extremely low (and at the time undeciphered) level, and provided interfaces for the external interrupts from the bus controllers.
Several other pins appear to do things like turn the Macintosh off. Even now we don't know what everything on the VIA chips does or if all the pins have a real use. It also turned out I got the easy end. The later Macintosh machines replace the second VIA with a device known as RBV (Ram Based Video) which contains a bad emulation of a VIA chip and various other components in one piece of glue logic.
Basic interrupt handling on a Macintosh is relatively clean. A great deal of attention has been paid to keeping interrupts that need a fast response at a higher priority that time consuming processes. That works well under MacOS but Linux itself tends to take rather too binary a view of interrupts especially in the drivers. Certain interrupts are wired in strange ways presumably to save components - the SCSI interrupt for example is wired through a VIA but is effectively upside down compared with the other interrupt sources. Apple saved an inverter by using the fact the VIA can handle either direction of state change as an interrupt signal.
I ended up with two layers of interrupt handling, which were mostly hard coded. Unlike a PC the Macintosh interrupts are very much hard wired. Only the Nubus (plug in) cards change positions, and they all share one interrupt which sets bits in a VIA register to indicate the real interrupt source.
Nubus proved quite entertaining. The documentation is quite weak and all written from the point of view of building a card for a Macintosh. It took about a week before the boot up code would scan and report a list of which nubus slots were occupied and the name of the devices. Once it worked the Nubus turned out to be an extremely well designed system with features much like PCI. Each slot is allocated a set of memory resources and can raise an interrupt. A ROM allows the OS to read each device for identification and driver information. The ROM also contains other "useful" data including icons for the device. At the moment these are not made visible under Linux, but the intention is to support /proc/nubus/[slot]/icon.xpm at some time.