what kernel to use on BeagleBone

Hiya,

I am currently using kernel 3.2.9 on BeagleBone. I have come across
two issues that may be kernel related. I would like therefore to try
other kernel versions that hopefully have fixes for these issues.

Github ([1]) has a number of kernel branches: beaglebone-3.2,
beaglebone-3.6, 3.7 and 3.8. I was wondering which one should I try?
Do all these branches have the same BB feature support and are equally
stable, or some are better than others? Should I assume that the most
recent branch other than master (currently 3.8) is always the best
one?

The 3.7 and 3.8 branches, do they support both BeagleBoard and BeagleBone?

Thanks.

Use the 3.8 branch for the beaglebone...

Regards,

Thanks.

Is the 3.8 branch meant for BeagleBone Black? I tried to run patch.sh after a git clone of that branch, but ran out of memory on the Bone about partway through receiving the objects.

You'll likely need a swap file and more storage if you want to build on
the 'bone. The build scripts pull a full git clone of the Linux kernel
(1.4G on my system). Plus building kernels on the 'Bone is painful,
unless you really like waiting.

Run the kernel build on a desktop or server Linux system and it will go
a lot faster. The scripts will automatically grab and configure a cross
compiler for you so you can build an ARM kernel on an x86 machine.

Thanks for the heads up. I realized how naive I was being to attempt building directly on the 'Bone and have since built it on my Linux desktop machine.

The final thing I’m hung up on, though, is how to get the built kernel onto the 'Bone. I found what seems like a great guide here, but it requires a serial-to-USB adapter, which I don’t have. Is it possible to use the SD card or USB port to install the new kernel? Or would I need to get an adapter and follow those instructions?

The other main resource I found was the readme on the kernel’s github, but I don’t understand the vague instructions that begin with “uEnv.txt for the angstrom u-boot 2012.10:” …

I usually just copy over the files from /deploy and manually install
them. The kernel and dtb files go in the uBoot partition, and you untar
the modules tgz at the root of the filesystem and they put themselves
into /lib/modules/<kernel-version>

Make sure you copy or rename the resulting kernel file to "zImage" on
the uBoot partition, removing the version ID from the filename.