What's the relationship between carrier boards and modules: can a carrier
board be used for modules that differ more than what we could model in
variants?

In the case of the Kontron module, variant refers to the COMe-mAL10 or COMe-m4AL10
module type. They differ in the type of memory (DDR3L or DDR4), and maybe they
differ in some chips.

https://www.kontron.com/products/iot/iot-industry-4.0/iot-ready-boards-and-modules/com-express/com-express-mini/come-mal10-e2-.html

COMe-mAL10 (E2): up to 8 GByte DDR3-1866 (-1600) memory down (ECC for E2-versions)
(get params from spd eeprom)

COMe-m4AL10 (E2): up to 16 GByte LPDDR4-2400 (-2133) memory down (non-ECC)
(set UPD params in romestage)

Moreover, each module variant can use one of the carrier boards. It could be
boards from the Kontron:

https://www.kontron.com/products/boards-and-standard-form-factors/com-express/starterkits-and-evaluation-boards/come-ref.carrier-i-t10-tni.html
https://www.kontron.com/products/boards-and-standard-form-factors/com-express/starterkits-and-evaluation-boards/come-eval-carrier-t10-gen2.html

other manufacturers can add their own backplane too.

Thus, we have the following tree:

mainboard -+- kontron -+- mal10 --+
                                  |
                                  +-- variants -+--- mal10
                                  |             |
                                  |             +--- m4al10
                                  |
                                  +-- carriers -+--- i-t10-tni
                                                |
                                                +--- eval-t10
                                                |
                                                +--- vendor-new-backplane

And maybe we should add a new separate catalog for vendors:

  +-- carriers -+- kontron -+- i-t10-tni
                |           |
                |           +- eval-t10
                |
                +- secunet --- some-backplane-that-they-use-together-with-mal10
                |
                +- vendor ---- new-backplane

If so, do we need a separate category for carriers?

I think at the moment there is no need to add carrierboards as a separate
category. There are very few COMe modules and carrier boards.

But, in the future it could be very handy and perhaps we should move all
carrierbоrd into a separate directory in src:

src --+--
      |
      +-- carrierboard -+- kontron -+- i-t10-tni -> in Kconfig : CARRIER_TYPE10_COME
                        |           |
                        |           +- eval-t10
                        |
                        +- aaeon ----- boxer26   -> in Kconfig : CARRIER_TYPE6_COME
                        |
                        +- secunet --- some-backplane-that-they-use-together-with-mal10
                        |
                        +- vendor ---- new-backplane

CONFIG_CARRIER_TYPE10 is set in src/mainboard/.../come-module/Kconfig

Thus, for each type 10 come module, all carrier boards with CONFIG_CARRIER_TYPE10 will be
available in menuconfig.

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