[Buildroot] new TI kernel version for beaglebone black

[Dan Pattison]

Hello All,

I have a question that is probably not 100% buildroot related, but was 
hoping to get some help. I am using buildroot to build a kernel and 
rootFS for a beaglebone black. Buildroot is awesome and builds 
everything fine. The board boots up and all packages work properly. 
Unfortunately, USB seems to be badly broken. In the kernel I have USB 
driver enabled and USB Announce New Devices turned on. Googling around I 
find several people with the same problem, hotplug does not work at all, 
and no device I have tried shows up in dmesg or lsusb on cold or warm 
boot. A band aid is to use a powered USB hub (have not tried that). Some 
guys on the beagleboard.org IRC say to try a newer kernel version (3.14 
or >) because beaglebone USB is fixed in newer kernel versions. Current 
buildroot beaglebone black kernel version is 3.12.10

In buildroot I used make beaglebone_defconfig.
Under the Kernel menu, Custom Git repository is selected.
The git URL is https://git.ti.com/ti-linux-kernel/ti-linux-kernel.git
The custom repository version is 7f280334068b7c875ade51f8f3921ab311f0c824
The def config is board/beaglebone/linux-3.12.config

How was the custom repository number 
(7f280334068b7c875ade51f8f3921ab311f0c824) derived? Looking on the TI 
gitorious site, I see they are working on kernel 3.15. How can I make 
buildroot use the newer version? How do I find the newer custom 
repository version? I tried to find my answer with google, but I must 
not be using the correct search term. Please excuse the newbish questions.

Thank you,

-- 
Dan Pattison
Ethertek Circuits