On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 06:34:06PM +0200, meino.cramer@gmx.de wrote:
<SNIP>
> 
> Moin Hinnerk, 
> (hopefully have guessed this greet correctly...I am from that
> part of Germany ;)
> 
> I have the source of the driver exclusivly compiled for 3.8.13
> as for 3.14.something (cant remember). 
> 3.14.x has some other problems (on that embedded platform) like
> not powering off when shutdown, random reboots and such.
> So decided to go back to 3.8.13.
> Yesterday I started updateing (eix-sync and emerge) that Gentoo
> and it ends up in an endless loop (bash update) of configureing
> (damn slow on that mini iron) and compiling - as it looks -
> of a single file.
> After more than 10 hours I CTRL-C that, reupated and now I am
> ...updateing the bash again.
> Sigh.
> Currently "fun" is something else...
> 
> Is the 3.15.10++ branch free of things like random reboot and
> not powering off?

Moin Meino,

(you've hit dead on spot: is there another "valid" greeting except that one?
;-) )

Right now I don't have a beaglebone black so sadly I can't provide any first
hand experience.
A 10 hour configure loop definitely sounds fishy to me. I'm running
a (hardened) Gentoo on a Raspberry Pi right now and I do compiling natively
most of the time (as it's not a that critical machine). As it's an even more
mini iron I know that it can be time consuming (maybe interesting: bash: 25
minutes, 57 seconds for 29 merges).
My rpi runs on a 3.16.3 kernel and my experience is that newer kernels help
immensely if available (that is if the hardware is either supported upstream or
there is a vendor branch testing new kernels). Especially for arm there is much
better support lately.
I find for less used platforms (read: "not-x86/amd64) the newer kernels are
often more stable than "stable" ones because the latter often doesn't
experience much testing.

So in the end there aren't many more options than just try it out (kernel
builds are quick luckily because - as you stated in your other reply - kernel
builds are very easily cross-compilable).

Good luck/Viel Erfolg,

Hinnerk