[yocto] Replacing HOB in Build Appliance for YP 1.9

[Georgescu, Alexandru C]

Hello,
In 1.9 HOB is intended to be deprecated by Toaster functionality. This
means that Build Appliance also must be changed. Since HOB is started
automatically in BA in order to help users get started quickly with YP, I
have the following proposal for updating BA in 1.9 and to replace HOB:


* Update current BA implementation in order to support Toaster (maybe few
patches needed to be included in the image in order to run Toaster)
* If Toaster is enabled in BA then the user might be able to run Toaster
from his host machine, or if BA is installed on a remote server, just
access the server via HTTP.
* this should be an easy solution to implement and maintain the BA
functionality.

There are solutions like Docker that were previously discussed, but my
opinion is that first of all Docker is limited to Linux only. Secondly it
will need much more QA effort (support at least 4 distros that YP
currently supports) and more failure prone for specific Docker
configurations.

Regards,
--
Alexandru Georgescu
Yocto QA Engineer
SSG/SSD Open Source Technology Center Romania