Booting My Own Linux 7.3 Build on a BeagleBone Black
I have a BeagleBone Black (TI AM335x, Cortex-A8, 512 MiB) whose SD card runs the official Debian 13 image with a 6.12 kernel. The goal was simple: cross-compile mainline Linux 7.3-rc7 on my desktop, hand it to the board over TFTP, and have it boot to a login prompt with working networking.
That sounds like a handful of commands. In practice I hit five problems along the way, and only one of them had anything to do with the kernel. This post walks through them in the order they happened.