Is it "safe" to disconnect the power to a carrier board?

[omer.levy]

Hi,

I was wondering, in general, but also specific to the Orin NX, is it safe to disconnect the power to a carrier board, can this cause damage to the board or to the software that runs on it ?

Will this kind of behaviour can cause file system corruptions or other problems ?

thanks

[linuxdev]

Jetsons are no different than a desktop PC. You should shut it down correctly before removing power. If your PC is up and running, and you yank the power from the wall, then a Jetson is the same (just lower power, but the software will receive the same corruption).

Something misunderstood by many people is just what a journaling filesystem is. Such a system will avoid corruption to some extent, but when it does so it is at the cost of losing recent updates. If that amount exceeds what the journal can handle, then corruption implies you can no longer safely use that memory because the parts which are lost due to change are intermixed with the parts which were originally already known, and more activity can overwrite anything, not just the recently changed data. At that point one is asked to manually “repair” the filesystem. Basically it is just asking someone else to take responsibility for cutting out random parts of the disk.

[omer.levy]

Thanks,
Your answer aligns with my thinking exactly.
So if a Jetson is in a box and there is no console to it that will allow the user to write: sudo shutdown now
Or something similar.
What is the correct path to handle a graceful shutdown ?
Should i connect a power off button to the board ?
Are all board support that ?
Does this button , which is an electrical solution triggers the OS to know that a shutdown is needed by some kind of an IRQ and there is waiting for the OS to shutdown …
I am a little bit puzzled

[linuxdev]

One can also shutdown via serial console or ssh over networking. I’m sure it would be a lot more trouble and a learning curve, but you might be able to attach a button designed to do this via GPIO. Depends on the circumstances, but you have not mentioned what access you actually have.