How to get a current kernel for odroid-u2?

[Robert Latest <boblatest@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

I have this old hardkernel odroid-u2 chugging away as a slow but
reliable mediaserver. It's a few years old and uses a Debian Wheezy  I
downloaded from Hardkernel's site.

I now wanted to connect a two-bay USB/SATA adapter, but the odroid
only sees one of the drives. Maybe it's something else, but probably
it's just due to an old kernel / udev. So I dist-upgraded to jessy but
got stuck halfway because the kernel is too old (3.0.57). Soon I found
out that upgrading the kernel isn't as straightforward as on i386,
first because of the (probably pretty simple) uboot loader, and
secondly because there is a large variety of ARM SoC flavors, each of
which requires its own kernel.

So.... any tips? Am I even on the right path that the "invisibility"
of one of the SATA drives is due to the old kernel /udev?

I'm willing to build a new kernel for this thing. Last time I did that
was probably literally almost 20 years ago. Also I'll probably need
some sort of serial adapter, as the only way I currently communicate
with this thing is via ssh; i.e., if the kernel won't boot I won't
know why.

There's plenty of recent pre-built images for various odroids, but not the
(obsolete) u2.

Any tips?

Thanks,
robert

rl@odroid:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor    : ARMv7 Processor rev 0 (v7l)
processor    : 0
BogoMIPS    : 1992.29

processor    : 1
BogoMIPS    : 1992.29

processor    : 2
BogoMIPS    : 1992.29

processor    : 3
BogoMIPS    : 1992.29

Features    : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls
CPU implementer    : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant    : 0x3
CPU part    : 0xc09
CPU revision    : 0

Hardware    : ODROIDU2
Revision    : 0000
Serial        : 0000000000000000
rl@odroid:~$ dmesg | head
[    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[    0.000000] Linux version 3.0.57 (root@linaro-ubuntu-desktop) (gcc
version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5) ) #12 SMP Mon Jun 3
00:09:36 UTC 2013
[    0.000000] CPU: ARMv7 Processor [413fc090] revision 0 (ARMv7), cr=10c5387d
[    0.000000] CPU: VIPT nonaliasing data cache, VIPT aliasing instruction cache
[    0.000000] Machine: ODROIDU2
[    0.000000] Memory policy: ECC disabled, Data cache writealloc
[    0.000000] CPU EXYNOS4412 (id 0xe4412220)
[    0.000000] exynos4_init_clocks: initializing clocks
[    0.000000] S3C24XX Clocks, Copyright 2004 Simtec Electronics
rl@odroid:~$