I see there has been a few posts talking about booting the OS.
Currently we are planning to use the Orin Nx 16 GB in our custom board. According to the design guide, we have the following PCIe interfaces to choose from:
PCIE0 - 4 Lanes
PCIE1 - 1 Lane
PCIE2 - 2 Lanes (or 1 Lane)
PCIE3 - 1 Lane if not using 2 Lanes in PCIE2
Normally in the Jetson Carrier board PCIE0 x4 is used to boot the OS - it has an NVME Solid state drive.
My questions:
We plan to repurpose PCIE0 x4 to communicate to an FPGA for high speed application data comms, is it possible to boot the Jetson OS using PCIE2 x2 lanes with an SSD?
Can the Jetson Orin Nx 16Gb be booted from SD card? There are pads for an SD card on the Jetson device itself, but the SD card holder is not populated.
If we can use SD card to boot, can we place the SD card holder on our custom board and use the correct pins on the Jetson SODIMM slot?
In the design guide here are the pins for the SD card
We plan to repurpose PCIE0 x4 to communicate to an FPGA for high speed application data comms, is it possible to boot the Jetson OS using PCIE2 x2 lanes with an SSD?
Yes, it is possible though we still suggest you use the original design that C4 to boot the medium.
No, there is no such thing. It is just a old naming inherited from Xavier NX. Orin NX does not have any function for sd. If you read the table, you will see it says the function there is a PCIe.
We are designing a custom carrier board for the Jetson Orin Nx so we want to be sure we aren’t including interfaces that cannot be used.
We will remove SD card capability as this cannot be used.
Also, in the case of not exposing PCIe over NVME, with the intention of running “headless” will it be safe to boot the Jetson via USB0 (recovery) or GbE?
Customer does not want to include NVME if not strictly needed.
In summary, the customer would like to use the following design flow:
Setup Jetson Orin Nx in NVIDIA Jetson Carier → Move to Custom carrier board
In the custom carrier, we have USB0 and GbE as the only external communication interfaces with PCIe x4 connecting to an FPGA. We are also using EFM8 power sequencing along with required power supplies as per the design guide.
My question: Being that the customer will setup the Jetson in the NVIDIA carrier then move it to our custom carrier, is USB0 and GbE enough for “headless operation”?
If not, can you let me know what else would be needed as a minimum?
For clarity here’s what we will plan to break out (minimal approach) - I need to know if this is feasible for headless operation after being setup in the NVIDIA carrier, then moving to custom carrier we are developing.
PCIE0 x4 - connected directly to FPGA
GbE - Outside world communication
USB0 - Recovery / General USB 2.0 Data Transfer
UART2 - Debug
In addition - from our conversation it seems that we must have an additional interface for booting
That would leave the possibility of using NVME PCIE2 x2, or additional USB (USB2.0 or 3.0)
Is it safe to say that without the additional interface needed for booting, then the Jetson Orin Nx will be useless on the custom carrier board we are creating?
If we MUST have one of these additional interfaces, which do you recommend for a minimal approach?
Finally, is it possible to use the GbE to boot the OS?
I understand that my questions may seem redundant - I thank you for your patients in answering these questions.
