I would still like for us to have a common kernel code to work from. I downloaded the 3.18.y RPi linux kernel and built it. It turns out y is 9, so now it seems that I'm ahead of everyone. It works, so it wasn't all for naught. I built it in TC on a RPi 2 so it took "only" a few hours.
A few things:
1. make menuconfig doesn't work because ncurses-dev doesn't have a pkg-config file. I was able to hand patch some files to get around this, but an update to ncurses-dev would make it easier.
2. make zImage needs bc at some point. bc requires lex, so I had to download and build flex and bc to finish the compile. Are there equivalent packages or commands for these that I couldn't find, or can we get these?
3. The modules in the initial ram fs (do we have a special name for it on the RPi?) are compressed, but an early modprobe in tc-config won't find modules like snd-bcm2835 unless they are uncompressed. But somewhere in the boot process that gets fixed. Why is that, and how could I load compressed modules earlier?