Xavier/Flashing the Board

NVIDIA®Jetson Xavier™
Introduction
SoM Overview Carrier Boards NVIDIA Xavier Developer Kit Connect Tech Rogue Connect Tech Mimic Software Support NVIDIA JetPack
JetPack 5.0.2
Getting Started Installing JetPack Flashing the board with GUI installer JetPack Components Compiling Source Code Flashing the Board from Cmdline Performance Tuning Evaluating Performance Set Values Manually Tuning Power Maximizing Performance
Development in the Board
Getting into the Board Using Serial Console Using SSH Using Ubuntu Login Installing Packages
Video Capture and Display
Description Supported Cameras Imx219 Driver Software Support Using GStreamer Using Libargus
Processors
HD Audio and Video Subystem Video Encoder Video Decoder JPEG Encoder and Decoder Video Image Compositor Audio Processing Engine Deep Learning Accelerator Volta GPU Description Using CUDA Using OpenGL
Interfaces
I2C SD/eMMC Controller USB Controller
GStreamer Pipelines
Capture and Display H264 H265 VP9 MPEG4 Simultaneous Streams Compositor
Deep Learning
TensorRT Using TensorRT integrated with Tensorflow Parsing a Tensorflow model for TensorRT Parsing Caffe model for TensorRT Building TensorRT API examples Deep Learning Accelerator Software Support Deep Learning Tutorials Jetson Inference Jetson Reinforcement
RidgeRun Products
GstPTZR GstCUDA GstColorTransfer GstWebRTC GstRtspSink GstInterpipe GstInference GStreamer Daemon GstShark
Reference Documentation
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Setting Board in Recovery Mode

To put the board into force USB Recovery Mode follow these instructions:

1. Power down the device. If connected, remove the AC adapter from the device. The device must be powered OFF, and not in a suspend or sleep state.
2. Connect the Type-C plug on the USB cable to the Recovery (USB Type-C) Port on the device and the other end to an available USB port on the host PC.
3. Connect the power adapter to the device.
4. Press and release the POWER button to power on device.
5. Press and hold the FORCE RECOVERY button: while pressing the FORCE RECOVERY button, press and release the RESET button; wait two seconds and release the FORCE RECOVERY button.
6. When the device is in recovery mode, lsusb command on host will list a line of "NVidia Corp"

All examples assume that the board is in recovery mode.

Flash Image with GUI Installer

This process will flash the image to the eMMC memory in the Jetson Board. After following the instructions in Installing Jetpack do the following:

1. Select network layout and interfaces for the specific enviroment

Figure 1. Select Network Layout

2. Follow the instructions in the pop-up window to put the device in recovery mode

Figure 2. Put Device in Recovery Mode

3. Press next to perform the OS flash and install the desired components

Figure 3. Flash Jetson Board

4. Wait for installation to finish

Figure 4. Finish Installation

Flash the Image with Cmdline Installer

Nvidia provides several scripts to help to generate the images and to flash the resulting images. Including if you are going to install uboot or fastboot. The main script to flash it is $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/flash.sh. What this script will do is to install or flash the image in the desired destination. It is important that the script is controlled by variables defined in the DTB file.

# Examples:
# ./flash.sh <target_board> mmcblk0p1                   - boot <target_board> from eMMC
# ./flash.sh <target_board> mmcblk1p1                   - boot <target_board> from SDCARD
# ./flash.sh <target_board> sda1                        - boot <target_board> from USB device
# ./flash.sh -N <IPaddr>:/nfsroot <target_board> eth0   - boot <target_board> from NFS
# ./flash.sh -k LNX <target_board> mmcblk1p1            - update <target_board> kernel
# ./flash.sh -k EBT <target_board> mmcblk1p1            - update <target_board> bootloader
#
# Optional Environment Variables:
# BCTFILE ---------------- Boot control table configuration file to be used.
# BOARDID ---------------- Pass boardid to override EEPROM value
# BOOTLOADER ------------- Bootloader binary to be flashed
# BOOTPARTLIMIT ---------- GPT data limit. (== Max BCT size + PPT size)
# BOOTPARTSIZE ----------- Total eMMC HW boot partition size.
# CFGFILE ---------------- Partition table configuration file to be used.
# CMDLINE ---------------- Target cmdline. See help for more information.
# DEVSECTSIZE ------------ Device Sector size. (default = 512Byte).
# DTBFILE ---------------- Device Tree file to be used.
# EMMCSIZE --------------- Size of target device eMMC (boot0+boot1+user).
# FLASHAPP --------------- Flash application running in host machine.
# FLASHER ---------------- Flash server running in target machine.
# IGNOREFASTBOOTCMDLINE -- Block fastboot from filling unspecified kernel
#                          cmdline parameters with its defaults.
# INITRD ----------------- Initrd image file to be flashed.
# KERNEL_IMAGE ----------- Linux kernel zImage file to be flashed.
# MTS -------------------- MTS file name such as mts_si.
# MTSPREBOOT ------------- MTS preboot file name such as mts_preboot_si.
# NFSARGS ---------------- Static Network assignments.
#			   <C-ipa>:<S-ipa>:<G-ipa>:<netmask>
# NFSROOT ---------------- NFSROOT i.e. <my IP addr>:/exported/rootfs_dir.
# ODMDATA ---------------- Odmdata to be used.
# ROOTFSSIZE ------------- Linux RootFS size (internal emmc/nand only).
# ROOTFS_DIR ------------- Linux RootFS directory name.
# SCEFILE ---------------- SCE firmware file such as camera-rtcpu-sce.bin.
# SPEFILE ---------------- SPE firmware file path such as bootloader/spe.bin.
# FAB -------------------- Target board's FAB ID.
# TEGRABOOT -------------- lowerlayer bootloader such as nvtboot.bin.
# WB0BOOT ---------------- Warmboot code such as nvtbootwb0.bin

Flash Filesystem

EMMC

cd $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-xavier mmcblk0p1

USB

Important: Only for USB tegra needs a firmware that is loaded from the filesystem so the USB port is not enabled on uboot and then it causes problems to mount the fs from there, you can read about it here.

To flash the filesystem to USB you need to put the filesystem on the USB first

1) Insert your USB flash/drive in your PC and check where it was mounted

mount
/dev/sdb1 on /media/$USER/EF02-5626 type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush,uhelper=udisks2)

2) Format the USB drive in your PCB

umount /dev/sdb1
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

3) Copy the filesystem to the USB drive. It takes a while, its size is around 2.4GB

mkdir $DEVDIR/images/fs
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 $DEVDIR/images/fs 
cd $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/rootfs/
sudo cp -a * $DEVDIR/images/fs  && sync

4) Unmount the USB drive and remove it

sudo umount $DEVDIR/images/fs

5) Finally connect the USB drive to the Jetson board put the Jetson on recovery mode, flash the board to look for the filesystem on the USB port:

cd $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-xavier sda1 #it can be other mount point

SD Card

Similar to USB but you need to replace the extlinux.conf so before copying the filesystem into the SD card run:

sudo cp $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/bootloader/t186ref/p2771-0000/extlinux.conf.sdcard $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/rootfs/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

then flash it

cd $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-xavier mmcblk1p1

NFS

1) First you need to set up your NFS server using these instructions.

2) Open file in $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/rootfs/etc/network/interfaces and add

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual

3) Then flash the board to generate and install the initrd image to use nfs, you need to do this everytime that you recompile the kernel

cd $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/
MY_IPADDRESS=192.169.0.3
sudo ./flash.sh -N $MY_IPADDRESS:$JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/rootfs jetson-xavier eth0

Flash Kernel

To flash your kernel you just need to copy it to /boot in your filesystem. The old method to flash it in the LNX partition (./flash.sh -k LNX <target_board> mmcblk1p1) is NOT longer used

sudo cp $DEVDIR/images/zImage $DEVDIR/images/Image $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/rootfs/boot/

if you are not booting from NFS then you need to reflash your filesysm in order to update the kernel. However, likely you did some changes in the kernel modules so it is recommended to run the apply_binaries.sh script instead of only copying the kernel images.

cd $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/
sudo ./apply_binaries.sh

then flash your filesystem again.

Flash Bootloader

Update the content of the EBT partition where uboot is located

cd $JETPACK_DIR/Xavier/Linux_for_Tegra/
sudo ./flash.sh -k EBT jetson-xavier mmcblk1p1

Boot Sequence

According to the U-boot guide provided by Nvidia uboot scans booteable devices as follows:

• External SD Card
• Internal eMMC
• USB Device
• NFS Device