When do you think there will be support for the GoflexNet's arcNumber in the mainline kirkwood kernel? what is invloved in before this happens?

Dose anyone have any insight into this?

It would make life a lot easier for potential GoflexNet users as Dockstars are getting harder to get hold of.

Yeah... I haven't touched my goflex net because of that reason...

Same boat, no booting with kirkwood kernel here.

Peter Carmichael wrote the necessary patches, but as far as I know they haven't yet been submitted to the linux-arm-kernel list for inclusion. I went through that process for the DockStar, and offered to help (since I just acquired a couple of cheap GoFlex Net boxes from Office Depot :-), but I haven't heard back from Peter yet.

Has any progress been made on this?

The linux-arm-kernel developers are moving to an approach that uses device trees (as originally used in Open Firmware for powerpc) to describe board-specific variants of the same basic architecture. That should eliminate the need for a new machine ID for minor differences in hardware. But it also means that patches for new boards are likely to be delayed until the new approach is settled.