About system.img.raw created in L4T/bootloader after flashing

Hello,

system.img, system.img.raw was created after flashing.

After flashing, can I delete this file?

whiat is system.img.raw?
it’s size is big.
Can you tell me why system.img.raw is created?

jetsonhostpc@jetsonhostpc-Vostro-470:~/coding/pure_nano/Linux_for_Tegra$ ls bootloader/system.img
system.img system.img.raw
jetsonhostpc@jetsonhostpc-Vostro-470:~/coding/pure_nano/Linux_for_Tegra$ sudo rm bootloader/system.img.raw

Thank you.

system.img.raw is the raw file and it will be parsed to system.img later.

You can delete it if you think it occupies your disk space.

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Extra info: When creating an image to flash onto the rootfs it starts with an exact binary image of what the partition will look like. This is what the “raw” image is. In the “old days” this was the only image produced, and the time to send that much data over USB2 meant it was slow to flash. If you rename the file “system.img”, and then flash while telling it to “reuse” the existing image, then the result will be exactly the same as if you were to use the original “sparse” system.img (other than taking longer). Thus the system.img is just faster.

Advantages of raw format are that it is easy to loopback mount it to edit or examine, whereas that’s a problem for sparse images. If you were to clone your Jetson, and name the cloned image “backup.img”, that would be a “sparse” file, and you would also get “backup.img.raw”. Sparse is created from raw.

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