Flashing custom NixOS image on Jetson NX Orin

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Orin NX
1

Hello! We are struggling to flash our NixOS image (with Linux kernel 5.10.104) into the Jetson NX Orin (devkit) using the nVidia scripts on JetPack 5.1.2. We are using the l4t_initrd_flash.sh script as the documentation suggests for production use.

It seems that this script doesn’t have --no-systemimg flag so we are passing it to the flash.sh script using -p flag. This seems to be ignored or at least the system re-creates and overwrites our system.img.

The command we run is:

sudo ./tools/kernel_flash/l4t_initrd_flash.sh --external-device nvme0n1p1 -u secureboot/ecp256.pem --uefi-keys uefi_keys/uefi_keys.conf -p "-c ./bootloader/t186ref/cfg/flash_t234_qspi.xml --no-systemimg" -c ./tools/kernel_flash/flash_l4t_t234_nvme.xml --showlogs --network usb0 jetson-orin-nano-devkit nvme0n1p1

What is the correct / recommended way to flash our own system image?

3

You should first do

sudo ./tools/kernel_flash/l4t_initrd_flash.sh --external-device nvme0n1p1 --no-flash -u secureboot/ecp256.pem --uefi-keys uefi_keys/uefi_keys.conf -p “-c ./bootloader/t186ref/cfg/flash_t234_qspi.xml” -c ./tools/kernel_flash/flash_l4t_t234_nvme.xml --showlogs --network usb0 jetson-orin-nano-devkit internal

to create both rootfs and bootloader images, and replace the old system.img with your own one, and do

sudo ./tools/kernel_flash/l4t_initrd_flash.sh --flash-only

4

Thanks @DaveYYY . Here are observations after we followed your suggestion:

  • If we replace bootloader/system.img file with our own the system will still boot into nVIDIA Ubuntu
  • If we replace tools/kernel_flash/images/external/system.img the kernel panic is triggered (log attached)
  • If we further replace kernel/Image with our 5.10.104 kernel, we get an error “r8168: disagrees about version of symbol module_layout”
[   10.079697] Run /init as init process
[   10.096030] Root device found: PARTUUID=e0a4c8f6-14f5-4c54-a989-d87ed917089e
[   10.339792] EXT4-fs (nvme0n1p1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
[   10.351369] Rootfs mounted over PARTUUID=e0a4c8f6-14f5-4c54-a989-d87ed917089e
[   10.364372] Switching from initrd to actual rootfs
[   10.374001] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00007f00
[   10.384787] CPU: 1 PID: 1 Comm: chroot Not tainted 5.10.120-tegra #1
[   10.393874] Hardware name: Unknown NVIDIA Orin NX Developer Kit/NVIDIA Orin NX Developer Kit, BIOS 4.1-33958178 08/01/2023
[   10.407816] Call trace:
[   10.412797]  dump_backtrace+0x0/0x1d0
[   10.419254]  show_stack+0x30/0x40
[   10.424556]  dump_stack+0xd8/0x138
[   10.428053]  panic+0x17c/0x384
[   10.431199]  do_exit+0xaa8/0xab0
[   10.434521]  do_group_exit+0x4c/0xb0
[   10.438198]  __arm64_sys_exit_group+0x28/0x30
[   10.442679]  el0_svc_common.constprop.0+0x80/0x1d0
[   10.447604]  do_el0_svc+0x38/0xb0
[   10.451012]  el0_svc+0x1c/0x30
[   10.454154]  el0_sync_handler+0xa8/0xb0
[   10.458098]  el0_sync+0x16c/0x180
[   10.461510] SMP: stopping secondary CPUs
[   10.465679] Kernel Offset: 0x4747678c0000 from 0xffff800010000000
[   10.471952] PHYS_OFFSET: 0xffff8c8040000000
[   10.476252] CPU features: 0x08040006,4a80aa38
[   10.480731] Memory Limit: none
[   10.483878] ---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00007f00 ]---
5

How did you generate this NixOS image?
Are you sure it’s compatible with your device?

I think this is the right way of doing it.

Because you only replace the kernel image, but not kernel modules, so the version of these two does not match.

7

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