Thanks for the response. I found out that there is GPIO support (gpio-mxc.c) that appears to handle the GPIO setup for interrupts properly, so I get a event from the "gpio-keys" config I set up in the device tree.
The only issue (not) is that there is more than just one or more bytes that get sent as an event. Good thing all I care about is that there is an event after the gpio changes state (vary rarely) which allow a blocking read to monitor it.