building OE out of tree modules is not possible

[Mike Holmes]

LNG needs to build out of trree modules for various tests, and for OpenVswitch via the CI build scripts.

[Fathi Boudra (fboudra)]

out of tree modules are difficult to manage in linaro images
– problem 1: oe delivers complete images
– problem 2: linaro delivers hwpack assisted kernels, modules and rootfs's

a. linaro modifies the oe build process to create oe-image that is built with kernel, modules, rfs
– platform / b&B
– difficulty = 2 of 5 (but supporting out of stream modules is not popular)

b. we could use a hwpack modified to use dkms for out of tree modules
– platform / b&b / infra
– difficulty = 4 of 5 (moving away from debian packaging could make this short-term only solution)

c. at runtime we could boot, download the module, build it, load it (maybe via dkms), /etc/modules... reboot and run the test
– lng-only
– difficulty = 3 of 5, a lot going on in the test scripts

d. add modules to LNG kernel tree (no additional effort from platform)
– lng-only
– difficulty = 2 of 5, all control and work by LNG resources.

[Chase Qi (chase-qi)]

Migrated to bugzilla: https://bugs.linaro.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496