Flash OS to USB and boot from USB by hotplugging

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Nano
#1

Hello,

I am new to nvidia jetson nano development kit. I am SDE at one of the major tech company from US. Needed help on below topics for our project.

Q1. Can we flash OS onto USB and boot from it by hotplugging.?
(I followed other threads on this forum and found out there is a way to transfer booting from SDCard to USB. Here: Foolproof guide to move from microSD to USB SSD? - #5 by mehmetdeniz. But this is not what mine use case is. I want flash Jetpack 4.5.1 onto usb and use that usb to install OS on jetson nano)

Q2. Can we customise jetpack 4.5.1 .img to install some dependencies and again wrap it into .img format to flash to sdcard?

Q3. Is there any third party tool, which allow us Ubuntu installation from desktop screen and replace OS on sdcard?

#3

Q1. Can we flash OS onto USB and boot from it by hotplugging.?

No, it is not possible. You can boot rootfs from usb or boot system from usb. However, this all requires a external host to flash your jetson using flash.sh.

Q2. Can we customise jetpack 4.5.1 .img to install some dependencies and again wrap it into .img format to flash to sdcard?

Yes, it is possible. There is a tool “jetson-disk-image-creator.sh” under Linux_for_Tegra/tools. You shall find it after you install sdkmanager.

Q3. Is there any third party tool, which allow us Ubuntu installation from desktop screen and replace OS on sdcard?

I think other users could share their experiment for this one. It seems some developers on this forum have moving to other OS.

#4

I went through jetson-disk-image-creator.sh, it requires sd-blob.img as input, my use case is can i customize sd-blob.img provided by nvidia in jetpack 4.5.1, customisation means installing some custom libraries into that blob, then extract new blob and use jetson-disk-image-creator.sh??? Thank you!!

#5

It just requires a string as the file name for your sdcard image and does not take the blob file as input.

https://docs.nvidia.com/jetson/l4t/index.html#page/Tegra%20Linux%20Driver%20Package%20Development%20Guide/flashing.html#wwpID0E0TJ0HA

#6

Thank you Wayne for quick response

my use case is can I customize sd-blob.img provided by NVidia in jetpack 4.5.1, customization means installing some custom extra libraries (apt installable) into that aforementioned blob, then extract new blob???

I understood sd-blob.img can be generated from jetson-disk-image-creator.sh though. Thank you!!

#7

Yes, you can. I understand what you want to do. What we are going to do has nothing to do with old blob file.

The Linux_for_Tegra/rootfs is the file system that would be installed into tegra side. You can use qemu and chroot to that and then run apt get install.

Or you can just use dd tool to copy your existing image blob from your image so that you don’t need to use jetson-disk-image-creator.sh.