And after I played around a bit and wrote some filler code I managed to produce a working glxgears. I checked 4 times to make sure I wasn't sw rendering.
I'm really quite surprised how little actual time this took, texturing and actual frag prog stuff will take a bit more time, but if someone is interested (and a few people are) having a working base point makes things a lot easier.
So
on my drm branch:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~airlied/dr
amd my mesa branch
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~airlied/me
all running on a Lenovo/IBM T60P with M56 FireGL in it.
I'd add a screenshot but you all know what a working gears looks like :)