So I’ve had good luck with the kernel.org kernels. Just compiled and rebooted into 2.6.30 and everything is working well. I am using debian’s make-kpkg which will build and package a kernel into a linux-image deb package which is very handy for installing multiple concurrent kernels — very handy for charging ahead with compiles without fearing that I might render my machine unbootable. As long as my speculative kernel builds don’t hose any filesystems I can use bleeding edge kernels without fear. I do a custom build which only support the hardware I actually have so new kernel drivers have no effect on the the actual kernel image I create, and by choosing conservative choices when I make oldconfig I have yet to build an unstable kernel.