Building the sparky image from source

[ascl]

Sorry if this is the wrong forum, but if it isn't correct, please point me in the right direction!

 

The Sparky kernel available in diet-pi is pretty old, and it seems like there would be some benefit with a newer kernel.... and outside of that, I like to see how things work. So, I cloned the git repo ( https://github.com/sparkysbc/sparky_sdk ) and followed the instructions, but did not meet success. So a few questions that hopefully someone can answer!

1. First off, the instructions are a little off. A few missing packages need to be installed (bc, gcc, g++, gcc-4.6 g++-4.6-multilib etc). Not a big deal.
2. sparky_sdk has kernel 3.10.37 included, and https://github.com/sparkysbc/Linux has 3.10.38. I'm not in front of my sparky right now, but I believe the current shipping kernel is 3.10.38. Can I just move 3.10.38 into sparky_sdk/kernel and build? Again, not a big deal, but would like to understand how the distributed image is created.
3. Neither of these kernels is "stock". Diffing the vanilla kernel source against either tree generates a decently large diff. I assume some of these things are for changes specific to the sparky board, which is fine... but there are a lot of other changes that aren't directly related to the sparky hardware, for example changes related to DSD. Are these backported changes or extra drivers added? What is the source of these?
4. https://github.com/sparkysbc/platform-sparky contains a readme that lists a bunch of patch descriptions, which could well match the changes in #3 (or at least some of them), and indeed some of the git commits seem to match that. However, there are still a large number of changes to the initial kernel check in. Is there a patch available somewhere that has the initial set of changes required for a kernel to run on sparky?
5. Unfortunately the link in #4 includes a binary tarball (not source). Are the sources for these available anywhere?
6. I see an 'owl' directory, which suggests using openwall ( http://www.openwall.com/Owl/ ), which is not really maintained any more. Again this is a bunch of binaries. Is this really openwall built modules?

EDIT: I forgot the most important question! the 'ubuntu' directory doesn't build at all, seems to be missing a tarball. Is there anywhere I can find this?

Lots of questions sorry!