I did an install of slackware arm current (as of 8 april) today using fatdog's image, kernel, etc. and after a quick play around I ran rpi-update which gave me a shiny new /lib/modules/3.10.37+ and I expect the newest firmware but the kernel was not upgraded or so it seemed, after trying several more times and having a look around it turned out kernel upgrades were going into /boot and not the vfat partition, mmcblk0p1. I copied the new kernel and other updated files over and rebooted to a 3.10.37 kernel. I don't remember having to do this after my last install back in December. Is this something to be expected. It is not mentioned on the fatdog rpiupdate page.

I've not tried rpi-update but I suspect that all would work if you mount the vfat partition in /boot.

I don't think there would be any problem with that at all. I hadn't bothered doing that on any pi/slack installs as it didn't seem necessary for any reason. perhaps that is how raspbian is set up since rpi-update was intended to update raspbian.

There is also the ability to use rpi-update to install the modules elsewhere. So if my vfat partition is mounted as /mnt/pi-boot I could do thisThere's a few more options, if your interested look here: https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update