[LEDE-DEV] External kernel version struggles

[Florian Fainelli]

Hi,

Not sure how many of us do actually use that feature, but using external
kernels with OpenWrt/LEDE yields essentially one big problem which is
that we almost always have to lie about the exact kernel version.

This manifests itself in several ways, all related:

- we don't determine the exact KERNEL_PATCHVER ahead of time (actually
we could/should?), yet, it needs to be provided because all the Kconfig
logic that is going to parse that version to expose appropriate config
options needs to run very early on (for modules, netfilter options etc.)

- a consequence of lying about the exact KERNEL_PATCHVER is that when
modules get installed into the root filesystem, they will end-up with a
a /lib/modules/ directory that is based on KERNEL_PATCHVER, whereas
insmod/modprobe expect to see something based on uname -r (which could
be based on git-describe), so there is no automatic insmod unless we do
a symbolic link of these two things

So, how do we properly solve that?

NB: this also plagues the kernels downloaded from git.

Thanks!
-- 
Florian