Jetson Nano not booting after upgrading to Ubuntu 22

Just got some Jetson Nano’s in for development, and was able to successfully update from Ubuntu 18 to 21 via software updater. Now, when updating from 21 to 22, I restarted and it is no longer booting, all I see is a blank black screen (no NVidia logo at startup).

Any ideas on how I can reflash this to the base image? or is it totally bricked?

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Ubuntu 20.04 is technically not supported on a Nano, and 22.04 is not supported on any Jetson. To get support for 20.04 or future version releases you’d need to have either Xavier or Orin hardware. Historically, the Ubuntu release upgrade mechanism was not supported for any of these since earlier releases did not have correct knowledge of boot requirements of this custom hardware. Later releases did add a version release upgrade mechanism, but Nano is very old and only has bug fix releases.

Your system is not bricked as this would imply there was firmware broken which prevents flashing. This won’t happen on any Jetson, no software would brick the system. I suppose there might be some odd circumstances of people manually altering some of the ROM via i2c which could break flashing, but this is exceedingly rare. You can still flash back to Ubuntu 18.04. To see a list of L4T releases supported look at this URL (L4T is what gets flashed, and JetPack/SDK Manager is what performs the flash):
https://developer.nvidia.com/linux-tegra

This is the corresponding JetPack/SDKM release page, and mentions the L4T version bound to each JetPack/SDKM version:
https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetpack-archive

It is possible that a release upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04 might work, but I am skeptical that the direct hardware access drivers for the GPU would be installed. It is possible that after such a release you are limited to software-only use of the GPU (e.g., CUDA would not function if this is the case). There is a package you can install (“sudo apt-get install mesa-utils”), and this package provides information about OpenGL and direct rendering when run from inside of the GUI. This would tell you about the drivers present if you run it from the Nano’s GUI, and would show provider information and version information (it would have to basically say NVIDIA and not Mesa):
glxinfo | egrep -i '(version|nvidia)'
(if NVIDIA shows up, then CUDA and direct rendering should function)

Thanks very much for the response. I got it working all the way up to 21.

I will re-flash back to 18, to get things going again. Didn’t realize that Nano was that old. thanks again

The Nano form factor is only a few years old, but the SoC it uses is nearly a decade old. It is the old Jetson TX1.

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