So I have been playing around with an idea to attempt to make a high performance network security device using the tegra as a berry PI board just doesn’t cut it…
I have used the default install of ubuntu with success and have setup several in a test environment,
My question is: Is is possible to install/boot from a USB/Sata/SD to a different flavor or linux os i.e. Razorback,Security Onion,Packetrix…
If so any thoughts on how one would accomplish this ? Would this completely defeat any advantage of using this device iam very new to this scene and would love any feedback.
That said, you could use the existing u-boot as a starting point…the bare metal setup is accomplished there and can have the boot loader on Jetson while selecting boot to another device via serial console at boot time. You could even keep the full L4T on Jetson this way. Whatever your other version of software is, you’d want to start with the zImage of the L4T and simply see where boot to a new rootfs takes you. The new rootfs could even have the nVidia L4T apply_binaries.sh aimed at the external memory to try to use the nVidia-specific files within the alternate o/s rootfs.
Take a look at the extlinux.conf file and realize you can copy an existing boot entry with a few edits and not only choose different kernel parameters, but rootfs as well. This is how I test new configurations when I don’t want to remove the original.
I would say that as long as you can use the L4T bootloader and kernel (maybe with a different config), it should be quite straightforward. Even more so if you don’t need accelerated video codecs or graphical environment as those might have dependencies on certain libc versions etc.
For testing purposes you should be able to put your rootfs on SD card or SSD, add a new option to u-boot menu and the during the boot choose which one to boot.