meta-qcom-distro: Queries regarding enabling downstream solution as an Overlay.

[maniSankarJ]

Hi team,
I want to enable a downstream solution as an overlay, and I have a few questions regarding the correct approach:

What is the recommended way to enable an overlay?
Can we enable overlays for both Config 1 and Config 2?
Does the solution strictly need to be provided as an .ipk package, or is adding it via a recipe that installs from prebuilts also considered an overlay?
Thanks in advance for your help!

[ndechesne]

config 1 is open source only.

for overlay, it is generally a recipe (or several recipes), which we can decide to install in the prop image. your recipe can pull prebuilt binaries, but we need a recipe for that. there are several examples of that in our repo already.

[lumag]

Please be more specific. "Downstream solution" might mean too many things for us to be able to give you a proper response. Also, there are enough examples in the repo. Have you checked those?

[ricardosalveti]

camx is a good example here, compatible with config 1 but built for config 2. With packages you can change the behavior from config 1 if required.

But curious if you can share the type of overlay that you are thinking about adding here, as that can help better guide the integration.

[maniSankarJ]

I am adding a feature overlay for QWES, which is a proprietary security feature. This overlay is downstream‑only and will not be upstreamed and there is no open‑source alternative. Similar to the CAMX recipe, I have raised a PR for QWES to use prebuilt binaries from QArtifactory. While there was internal feedback suggesting the overlay should apply to Config 1, my understanding is that Config 1 must not contain downstream or proprietary solutions, and therefore QWES should not included.
In either case I want to understand the procedure to make my solution an overlay if using prebuilts is not the right procedure for overlay.

QWES PR:qualcomm-linux/meta-qcom#1849

[ricardosalveti]

Is this just a proprietary service that requires QTEE? If that is the case, then just make it part of config 2 by default, users can still enable in config 1 via packages if needed.

At this point this wouldn't be an overlay, and simply another proprietary component which should be integrated as part of the proprietary image.