The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ
Chapter 9 - Debian and the kernel

9.1 Can I install and compile a kernel without some Debian-specific tweaking?

Yes.

There's only one common catch: the Debian C libraries are built with the most recent stable releases of the kernel headers. If you happen to need to compile a program with kernel headers newer than the ones from the stable branch, then you should either upgrade the package containing the headers (libc6-dev), or use the new headers from an unpacked tree of the newer kernel. That is, if the kernel sources are in /usr/src/linux, then you should add -I/usr/src/linux/include/ to your command line when compiling.