Booting from USB or other way to set up an AGX Xavier more easily

Hi Jetson Community,

I have a question regarding running AGX Xavier Devkits from USB-Sticks or another easy way to set it up.
In my case it would be helpful if people could obtain a jetson and easily get it working without the steps requiring a ubuntu host. Just like a Jetson Nano or a Raspberry Pi can be set up from an SD card image, what can be done with a more likely available windows machine.

I already set up an USB stick following the instructions on the Jetson Linux Developer Guide under “Flashing to USB Drive” and it worked on two different Jetsons, but as far as I know that involves only the root files system. The bootloader and other required partitions are still flashed on eMMC or already exist on it?
Do the devkits come with the necessary parts already installed so that you could try run a prepared USB root file system Image? Or would different versions of L4T then be a possible issue?

Kind regards and thanks in advance

I could be wrong, but so far as I know there is something like a “pointer to initial content” inside of the QSPI memory of the Xavier, and that pointer has no way to point at anything other than the eMMC (for content other than rootfs). Only flash has access to that initial pointer, so there is no way to change that without the flash software, and even if you could change this, it could only point at eMMC for those other partitions.

Same as linuxdev’s comment here.

No matter what kind of jetson devices, the boot devices are either QSPI-NOR or the emmc.
NX and Nano can boot directly with sdcard because our factory has done those software setting in the QSPI-NOR already.

AGX Xavier and other emmc based jetson devices don’t have such pre-configuration.

Thanks. That’s an detail that I was asking myself all the time.
Does anyone remember if the AGX Xavier devkits come with a L4T or bootloader pre installed out of the box? I don’t remember since I flashed it first as instructed.

There is no guarantee for what is flashed inside the AGX out from factory. Maybe some old jetpack release. Depends on when does this module come out from factory.

But whether it is flashed in the factory really does not matter…
Even if there is something installed, this original setting is still booting from emmc. Which means no matter what kind of usb drive or sdcard you insert to the AGX, it by default still boots from the emmc.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.