I’ve inherited several TX1 images that were compressed using bootloader/mksparse. I don’t have the raw image files. I’d like to turn these back into files I can mount on my desktop. I know I could flash them onto a board, then clone the image, but was hoping there was a faster way.

“Sparse” is a way to store a file system which isn’t just for Jetsons, there are places throughout Linux where this is supported. The trouble is that it may be supported differently (or not at all) on different Linux distributions. The mksparse file has the ability to turn uncompressed raw into spar…

Thanks for your help. I’m at least learning something about sparse files in Linux. All images are the same L4T version: R24.2.1. I’m running Ubuntu 16.04. cp --sparse=never produces a file identical in size and contents - I checked with diff. The error I get on mounting is what you would expect: m…

Creating sparse files isn’t specific to NVIDIA, although the tool is. Sparse files are described here: [url] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file[/url] The fill byte specified is NULL, which could be anything (it’s customizable), but when the sparse file is converted to raw the Jetson specific…

Nice to know about that…I’ll give that a try one of these days when I have just the sparse image. Sounds quite useful.

Decompressing a sparse image?

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson Systems Jetson TX1

wsmlby December 6, 2021, 8:56pm 5

Actually I found a solution(after 4 years):

you can use the android simg2img tool, in ubuntu you can install it by
sudo apt install android-sdk-libsparse-utils

then just

simg2img <spare.img> <uncompressed.img.raw>

How to generate system.img.raw to system.img

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Decompressing a sparse image?

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