Kernel is not involved, this is an u-boot environment change.
I was able to reproduce this by making an eMMC image with hwpack_linaro-lt-snowball_20120327-1_armel_supported.tar.gz which definitely has a non-broken u-boot, so I'm not sure where the issue comes from. Possible culprits are the u-boot env from startupfiles (but they worked previously and haven't been updated recently) or linaro-image-tools.
Kernel is not involved, this is an u-boot environment change.
I was able to reproduce this by making an eMMC image with hwpack_ linaro- lt-snowball_ 20120327- 1_armel_ supported. tar.gz which definitely has a non-broken u-boot, so I'm not sure where the issue comes from. Possible culprits are the u-boot env from startupfiles (but they worked previously and haven't been updated recently) or linaro-image-tools.
In any case, this needs further investigations.