OK, I made just a little progress on this today. I got a very old ext3 (0.0.2d) to patch onto the empeg kernel tree and compile. I also got updated e2fsprogs compiled. Amazingly enough it boots and seems to work as expected with ext2 partitions. I was able to create a journal file for an existing ext2 partition as well as format a partition fresh as ext3. Unfortunately I can't mount the partitions. I get this error...

empeg:/# mount -t ext3 /dev/hda4 /test
attempt to access beyond end of device
03:04: rw=0, want=2147483632, limit=9737280
dev 03:04 blksize=4096 blocknr=-5 sector=-40 size=4096 count=1
JFS: no valid journal superblock found
EXT3-fs: error loading journal.
attempt to access beyond end of device
03:04: rw=1, want=2147483632, limit=9737280
dev 03:04 blksize=4096 blocknr=-5 sector=-40 size=4096 count=1
EXT3-fs: get root inode failed
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda4,
or too many mounted file systems

If I am reading that right it is trying to read way past the end of the partition. I don't know if this old of an ext3 is actually supposed to work on an arm architechture so maybe I am having endianness issues and am just SOL? I think my next step is to try to patch up to a later version of the ext3 stuff. Any other ideas?

-Mike