[yocto] Updating NIC drivers in older Yocto

[Dave Mulder]

I have been using a Sandy Bridge Yocto 1.3 build for a couple years now, on off-the-shelf Intel PC motherboards. I also build an application.

I am now looking into using more recent motherboards. The OS boots just fine, but the new NICs (Intel, Realtek) are not supported by the old 3.4.11 kernel.

What's the best way to support new NICs?  I can see three options:


1.       New Yocto.  I suspect (but would be happy to be wrong) that my application would need to be built against a different sysroot/toolchain, which seems like it would cause backward-compatibility problems (can't run new application on old OS), and I would prefer to not have multiple builds of the application and have to have the host software determine which version is needed (it's an embedded application, and the OS is headless).

2.       New kernel, old Yocto.  I don't know that this is actually an option, or how new of a kernel can be used in Yocto 1.3.  If this is an option, it seems like my application would not need to be rebuilt.

3.       Loadable drivers for new NICs (rather than using the ones built into the kernel).  I don't know that this is doable either.

Are there other options?  Can a new application be built that will work with multiple versions of the OS?  Is that even a problem, or am I just assuming the worst?

Thanks!
Dave
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