Cloning software on TX2?

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TX2
#1

Hello, my apologies if the answer to my question is basic, or has already been answered, but I am not super familiar with Linux. Here is my situation:
We ordered 2 TX2’s, one for developing on directly, and one for our robot. Well, the robot chip has been sitting in a closet for a month whilst the dev chip has been worked on, and now has a primitive code on it. Is there an easy way to duplicate everything from the dev chip to the robot chip? (Both run jetpack 3.2)

I’ve done something similar with 2 RPi’s in the past, I believe the process is called cloning. Is there a similar process for the TX2’s? Is there a faster or easier way that I’m unaware of?

I’m still new to Linux as a whole, so any help would be greatly appreciated!

#2

Hi mikeperreman,

Please check if “Flashing and Booting the Target Device” section in https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/dlc/l4t-documentation-28-2 can satisfy you.

#3

A bit of an expansion on the topic…see that URL for details, but as long as two Jetsons are using the same release you can clone and restore the rootfs. You will see flash commands, and the “-r” part says to reuse an existing “Linux_for_Tegra/bootloader/system.img” file. If flashing, a clone will provide a system.img compatible with a generated system.img. Putting a clone in in place of generating the system.img will do what you want.

Clone and flash actually produce both “bootloader/system.img” and “bootloader/system.img.raw”. The “raw” file is loopback mountable and is the full size of the root partition…so perhaps 30GB in size for every copy you have. The “.img” file is a “sparse” file and is smaller (essentially a cheap form of compression), but cannot be loopback mounted. You can delete the sparse version of the clone and rename the loopback mountable version as “system.img” and flash will work just fine (though it will take a lot longer). The reason to do this is that loopback mountable images can be edited, or you can mount them and use them as an rsync target or source between the host and any Jetson. Once you save only the sparse image you will never again be able to do anything with it other than flash…this is not a standard format sparse image and apparently there are no tools to convert it back to raw.

#4

See here for a wiki article on cloning TX2: https://elinux.org/Jetson/TX2_Cloning

This will allow you to read back the system.img that linuxdev mentioned, then re-flash it with L4T.