| I followed Olimex's instructions [1] for their AM352-SOM, which is very similar to the BBB. From those instructions it's not difficult to build a working kernel, u-boot and debian-based rootfs. In fact, I highly recommend this route (debootstrap) if you're not interested in compiling everything (the way buildroot and OE do it) and instead rely on Debian's prebuilt ARM packages. You still get to customize exactly what is in your image; adding or removing pre-installed packages is not difficult. Plus you get apt/dpkg, for updates which IMO is superior to ipkg. I've used both kernel v4.4 with Debian Jessie and 4.9 with stretch, both work well. I've got a bash script which acts as a pseudo-makefile that does the whole shebang: builds kernel & u-boot with my kconfig/ DTS, calls debootstrap including my preferred list of packages, applies my rootfs customizations and spits out an image ready to burn directly to an SD card. The whole thing runs in a docker container (could also use Vagrant) from my Mac workstation. Tweaking the package list, distro or kernel version is mostly a matter of changing a few constants defined at the top of the script. Note that BBB is slightly different from the Olimex module hardware-wise, but the process is essentially the same. Also note, the ti linux kernel is close mainline, whereas
the bbOrg kernel has tons of patches for their "capes" system. If you're not interested in expanding the BBB with capes I think you can stick with the ti kernel sources. You could also build a very minimal busybox-based distro. But from there you're pretty much on your own w/r/t additional packages. [1] https://www.olimex.com/wiki/AM335x |