Hardware components

[Koz]

The netwinder has a unique set of hardware components for which a unix 
os has been crafted to run.
The 'boot-kernel' runs at power-up, testing and setting up the hardware 
present and presents the user with
the command prompt.

I would like to switch off the firmware rom based hardware 
initialization phase and replace it with a different boot-up
program. Rather I would like to know what the rom does - I'm not 
interested in the code. It is probably proprietary.

For this I need to know about the hardware inside the box and how each 
chip works - what it does and how to control
it.

I know that this information will exist somewhere. If someone could give 
me some directions to lists etc I would be
grateful. Who might have this info?

At this stage I don't want to open up the box etc, etc.

I am not a unix programmer. I program at a machine code level so I need 
to access this box's hardware directly.
I need to avoid unix altogether but I need to be able to compile to it 
and boot it.

Thanks.

Peko