Running without Nickel or pickel or ntx_hwconfig is not a supported configuration. There's okreader for that
.
(Handling those issues on our own would be fragile, error-prone, and basically reinventing the wheel for, again, an unsupported setup. Incidentally, that's why okreader's hardware support is limited).
As far as CPU schedulers go, it probably doesn't ship with interactive, that's to be expected, but it *should* offer ondemand, though.
In any case, on that front, the startup script is designed to do nothing if nothing sensible is possible on the current HW. Which might indeed be the case on <= Mk.5 devices, given how defensively I coded that after a few rounds of tests on various older models.