Flash TK1 from Ubuntu 18.04?

Hello,

I recently purchased a TK1 from nvidia. Is there any way to flash from the newest ubuntu version? I would prefer not to install an older version of ubuntu.

Thanks for your assistance!

  • Tyler.

JetPack isn’t supported on newer Ubuntu. If you just want to flash though you can use command line (command line doesn’t support adding additional packages). Even if you flash now on command line you can run JetPack at a later date and just uncheck the flash, so it isn’t like flashing now will stop using JetPack later.

Here’s an older post talking about command line flash. It’s a bit out of date, you’d want R21.7 driver now:
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/982779/jetson-tk1/how-to-perform-a-correct-fresh-ubuntu-install-on-jetson-tk1/post/5040584/#5040584

The R21.7 URL:
https://developer.nvidia.com/linux-tegra-r217

One note about newer Linux distributions…and I don’t know if this is set up on Ubuntu 18.04 or not, but you might want to check…look on your host if it has “metadata_csum” or “64bit” in the “ext4” section of your host’s “/etc/mke2fs.conf”. If it does, then you need to modify the flash to tell it to not use 64-bit extensions during flash. Linux on the Jetson supports 64-bit, but the U-Boot bootloader does not.

To force flash.sh to not use 64-bit (and this only matters if your host uses 64-bit by default), find this line in flash.sh:

mkfs -t $4 ${loop_dev} > /dev/null 2>&1;

Change the line to:

mkfs -t $4 <b>-O ^metadata_csum,64bit</b> ${loop_dev} > /dev/null 2>&1;

I can confirm that this fixed my issue for Ubuntu 18.04. One important difference change though:

mkfs -t $4 -O ^metadata_csum,^64bit ${loop_dev} > /dev/null 2>&1;

(note additional carrot before “64bit”. Made a difference for me.)

I don’t have a PC with Ubuntu 18.04 yet (I’ve never looked to see if it defaults to the 64bit extensions), but I suspect eventually most PC distributions will get the 64bit extensions (which won’t work on the Jetson due to U-Boot not understanding those extensions). Glad to know 18.04 has this.

FYI, for those interested, you could add that edit in flash.sh and it wouldn’t hurt if the o/s doesn’t use 64bit extensions as a default.