Flash ONLY bootloader on Jetson tx2 with external SSD

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TX2
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The most common case that users cannot understand is the difference between “boot from” and “mount file system from”

  1. The boot from means where to find the extlinux.conf and the kernel.

  2. The filesystem case means where to load the file system. This is decided by the “root=” in your kernel command line.

The (1) depends on the capability of bootloader, thus, it does not 100% support each external drive. For example, below document lists each “boot from” case.

https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/l4t/index.html#page/Tegra%20Linux%20Driver%20Package%20Development%20Guide/flashing.html#wwpID0E0HM0HA

Thus, you shall see something as below. The “applies to” does not have tx2, which means TX2 uboot is not able to load usb.

image

However, after kernel is up from emmc, you can still ask it to mount the rootfs from the usb drive. Just make it easier to understand, if you can see the device in /dev after boots up, it means kernel has ability to load it up.

Thus, there are different combination that can achieve. For example, you can boot from sdcard and then mount file system from usb. You can also boot from emmc and then mount the file system on nvme.

The only point here is make sure the bootloader or the kernel can load it or not.

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