Advice on upgrading kernel from Squeeze 2.6 on SS4000-E

[Maciej Soltysiak <maciej@soltysiak.com>]

Hi,

I've recently revived my SS4000-E with Squeeze. Would you be able to
provide advice on upgrading to a more recent kernel?
My motivation is to get some Arnaud's patches since Squeeze's 2.6.26
and all ext4 and md/RAID (RAID10 mostly) benefits of newer kernels (I
understand the possible needs to upgrade userland)

Some questions:
1) Would it magically work to install linux-image-3.2.0-3-iop32x from
tesing or would I need to put the zImage file through YMODEM and
modify boot_script_data?
2) Since I'm really after some relatively news stuff like ext4
metadata checksums which is in 3.5, should I just use vanilla kernel +
Arnaud's Patches, compile, put zImage through YMODEM?
3) Are there any tutorials on this, including compiling a kernel for a
different arch ? I'd rather compile on my laptop, than to choke Xscale
with compiling the kernel.

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
Maciej