CLI way to provision target Drive AGX system with fine-grained control

Hello, I use Jetson’s hardware (used TX1, TX1, Nano, AGX Xavier) for two years already and have no problem with provisioning and customizing provisioning for these boards. So far recently i was needed to provision Drive AGX Xavier with Drive Sw.10.0. Experience was a bit frustrating, because i had really high expectations about the Drive platform. I spent two days looking thru internals (using bootburn, pdkinstaller), checking different hypervisor configurations (RT/nonRT, dual exec mode, etc.), trying manual provisioning with this link ,etc.

In the end my main outcome, the only documented way for provisioning is to use sdkmanager for all steps, which does not give any flexibility (it always provisions full hyperion platform with non-RT settings), all steps are baked-in together.

  1. Anyway, back to constructive feedback, i’m looking for fixed and extended version of this manual. At the moment, it has following issues:
  • there is no way to get 7z archives, but most (not all) run files are already available from sdkmanager “download only” option.
  • bootburn.sh misses some platform json files for e3550b03-t194a
  • it’s also not clear which images and when are built? I see in pdkinstaller logs that it builds a lot of images (bootloaders, kernel, different partitions).
  1. For a short term solution, can you please advice, should i use pdkmanager or bootburn.sh with some scripts to build images? I’m mostly interested in quick updates for Xavier A, but also having transparency in hypervisor configurations would also be great to have.

Thanks

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Hello roman48tdr,

Drive AGX platform has a completely different software stack and a more complex one than the Jetson family platforms.
That said, it is expected that provisioning the Drive Software consists of a different procedure that has multiple gentle steps.

SDK Manager simplifies it for the user in case a flashing of the original package as-is is needed.

We do appreciate feedback on our documentation, as it is improving in every software release. So it is helpful to understand your specific needs (that are probably shared by others) and see how to improve our documentation if needed.

Answering your questions:

please refer to here: (this part of the documentation will be removed next release)
7z-files-not-found-for-command-line-install

for the initial installation of the Drive Software and flashing of the board the right procedure is to use SDK Manager (documentation is here)
for flashing from the command line using Drive scripts please refer to Flashing Basics documentation here
for flashing customization please refer to the documentation here

good luck