Sometimes there is enough reward to upgrading to a newer Blackfin Linux release:
1)for better performance
2)for bug fix on newer version
3)for new kernel feature/drivers that exits only in newer version of kernel
Generally we would advise Blackfin Linux users to take following procedure when moving to a newer version:
1) Linux kernel driver: make a patch for the old working version, against the clean default old version of ADI release, and merge this patch to the newer clean ADI release.
2) User applications: first make a patch and merge it to newer version of application, as it does for kernel driver, then merge it to the buildroot if it's moving from distribution to buildroot, the general way for adding packages in buildroot is documented in: http://buildroot.uclibc.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#adding-packages