A/B Redundancy support confirmation for 5.x

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Xavier NX
1

Dear Team,

We are trying to get the A/B Redundancy working since 14.6.2022.

In 5.0.1 DP it was not supported, we were told 5.0.2 will support it.
Despite the announcement, in 5.0.2 the support was still missing.
We developed a workaround with @JerryChang , as it did not work out of the box.
For full support we should wait for 5.1.

Now in 5.1 A/B is officially supported.
The actual state is that it does not work. The system will reboot, but not switch the slot.
The workaround from 5.0.1 does not work anymore, as slot can not be set bootable anymore.
So even if it would switch the slot, we could not boot into the system anymore without accessing the boot variables via UEFI, which is not a working solution for an OTA update.

There will be a Jetpack 5.2 and a Jetpack 5.3. After that you will not support Xavier anymore.

Can you assure that 5.2 or a least 5.3 will:

  • Automatically failover to the other slot when the current slot can’t boot
  • Have the option in nvbootctrl to set the unbootable status to normal again?(The idea of setting it to normal again in the UEFI is not applicable for an OTA update)

We slowly develop some anxiety that we develop a product, which in the end won’t have any working software. A quarter year passed and nothing happened.

5

hello seeky15,

we’ve test this locally, so far, there’s only Xavier-NX-eMMC with l4t-r35.2.1 is able to perform RootfsA/B redundancy successfully.

may I double confirm which Xavier NX you’re working with,
for example, is it Xavier NX with internal eMMC or external SD?

6

Hey @JerryChang

I’ve got both lying around here, the emmc and the sd card module.
SD Card does not work as you mentioned, even not with the watchdog fix.

With the watchdog enabled the emmc version does go into kernel panic 3 times. After that it simply keeps rebooting itself. I am not sure what it does, but it fails to boot the other slot, like the sd one does…