Flash multi TX1 modules at the same time

Hi,

Is there a tool or a way to flash multi TX1 modules at the same time?
For production use, this would save the production time.

thank you,

So far as I know the flash program runs only a single instance and does not understand multiple Jetson devices on USB…I imagine more than one Jetson in recovery mode would either cause some to be ignored, or an error. Even if multiple Jetsons could be flashed simultaneously you would probably need to be sure one root HUB on the host is reserved for each Jetson…I’m unsure how bandwidth restrictions would deal with being slowed, but USB is a typical failure point in VMs during flash.

Normally I would suggest staying away from VMs. However, if you do get it right (e.g., setting USB buffer size increase and forcing USB2 mode), and have one root HUB per VM, then you might get away with this. The system.img file could be served from NFS if read-only (you’d generate an image normally, e.g., via clone of the unit you want to be the reference to), which I would think would be quite fast (reading from read-only NFS on a machine with lots of RAM gets a caching advantage from the server and is typically far faster than a real hard drive all by itself).

It would be quite interesting if NVIDIA wanted to make the nvflash executable aware of multiple Jetson devices using distinct identifiers beyond just the USB device number (“0955” identifying NVIDIA, “7721” identifying a TX1…they all use this, so this alone would no longer be sufficient). Then the executable app itself would need to spawn a thread for each unit since I doubt each would respond exactly synchronized. Batch flashing might be a useful additional feature for manufacturers in a future release, though the host itself would have to meet some minimum standards.

How many Jetsons do you feel is a proper batch size to flash simultaneously for your situation?

Dear Linuxdev,

Thank you for your information.

How many Jetsons do you feel is a proper batch size to flash simultaneously for your situation?
—> We expect to flash 6 or 8 jestsons simultaneously.

Please correct me, if I misunderstood your point.
Currently, it looks no way to flash TX1 simultaneously.

Will nVidia add batch flashing feature in future release?

Thank you,

You are correct, I do not believe there is a way to flash several Jetsons from the same host at the same time. I imagine that having 6 or 8 small (mini-ITX/small footprint?) computers flashing systems using the same read-only NFS system.img (the “-r” reuse option of flash.sh) would be the best way to go (perhaps the small footprint systems could even be diskless/headless and PXE booted). A batch flash feature would be quite useful to commercial production.