The Fx30-CatM is the choice to deploy products in Asia, however for Europe, the Fx30-Cat1 may be a better choice. In France, Orange is the only operator having deployed the LTE-M, so if the LTE-M of this operator is not good enough, we are going to fallback in 2G. It would be nice to fall back in 3G, which is possible with the Fx30-Cat1.
I am using a custom Linux where I have my own applications built on top of the Yocto layers provided by Sierra Wireless. Can the Linux part be identical on the Fx30-CAtM and the Fx30-Cat1, … or with a minimal number of modifications?
I would like to avoid having to maintain two very different build environments. Do you have some developments done in this direction?
It really depends on how you plan to do your source control. Jack is correct that the Leaf workspaces are different, but the Leaf package manager really just allows you to pull your source.
If you plan to create your own repos for source control, then it is indeed possible to share the code base. Within the meta-columbia-x folder, you’ll see there are 2 yocto layers: meta-columbia-x-catm and meta-columbia-x-cat1. These 2 layers were added to allow differences between the 2 builds.
In the case of the CatM R14.1 and Cat1 R16, if you do a diff on the kernel folders, I believe they are indeed identical. They are on different branches because they are released for different module families. Also, since the repos differ, the 2 different product families could have different patches applied to the kernel within the yocto layers.
The makefile and build scripts are almostidentical, but there some build options differences for Cat1 vs CatM. There are also many components that are different, so you’ll need to be careful (for example the contents of meta-swi-extras/meta-swi-mdm9x28-fx30-bin/files)
The WP76 and WP77 releases have their own independent release cadences, and since the FX30 releases are based off the WP releases, there is no guarantee the kernel will remain identical.
If you decide to use repo and create your own manifests, you can manage this fairly easily by pulling the kernel branch you need.