How about just compiling an initial ramdisk in to the kernel and
have pre-init run from there? I know Mark's (very sensible) design
philosophy is to make installation of hijack as painless as possible for
the end-user, but so far this has meant some things going in the kernel
which might have been better in userland. Maybe having a way to ship
a userland program in the kernel (using initrd) would get around this
more elegantly than doing yet more stuff in the kernel.