Thank you things are becoming clearer and I do like the looks of BuildRoot. Also I found some posts on how to import the kernel source into my own gitlab server and still have a path for merging in mainline changes.
e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10626946/how-to-mirror-the-official-linux-kernel-tree-in-a-private-gitolite-server
I really don't like digging to far into something without understanding how I'm going to manage it.
I do have one question, your instructions (and it looks like the top level TI makefile does this) are for building zImage and placing zImage in the /boot directory, however many of the how to's and much of the documentation talk about uImage (generated from the mkimage tool) being required to boot the kernel from U-Boot, am I missing something or is that requirement gone?
Thanks,
Matt S.