can you give a little more details on the changes?
You can definitely do it that way, and I believe you don't need to rebuilt the entire OS, just the kernel is fine:
$ m docker-linux-imx
$ cd ./out/product/packages/bsp
$ scp ./linux-image-4.14.98-imx_11–4_arm64.deb mendel@board-ip
$ ssh mendel@board-ip
$ sudo dpkg -i ./linux-image-4.14.98-imx_11–4_arm64.deb
Another way is to create a device tree overlays. For instance here is a dts for disabling the hdmi: https://gist.github.com/Namburger/f700eb6b18bd1e3697638088d5995c8b
You can then compile it and move it to /boot:
$ dtc -@ -I dts -O dtb -o disable-hdmi.dtbo disable_hdmi.dts
$ sudo mv disable-hdmi.dtbo /boot
Then add the file to /boot/overlays.txt
to apply it:
$ cat /boot/overlays.txt
# List of device tree overlays to load. Format: overlay=<dtbo name, no extenstion> <dtbo2> ...
overlay= disable-hdmi