Thanks to information received from Mace Moneta, I can confirm that the ‘missing files’ problem I experienced with Raspberry Pi GIT downloads was due to the fact that I was using the ‘Download ZIP‘ option, which – it seems – is defective!

The solution is to use the # git clone……. command, as follows:

# git clone -b <branch_name> --single-branch https://github.com/xxx/xxx

So, for the latest Pi version:

git clone -b rpi-3.11.y --single-branch https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux

One further point..  For # git clone.. downloads, remember to deselect ‘General Setup / Automatically append version information to the version string’ in xconfig (or equivalent), if you don’t want a long string of odd characters after the resulting module version in ~/lib.modules!

Robert Gadsdon.   September 23, 2013