Purpose of badpage.bin

[gene.sally]

What is the purpose of this file in the boot-up process. We found that the file filled with all zeros will work with older versions of uefi bootloader, but newer versions require some data to written at various locations. When were the requirements for this file changed? Searching through the existing documentation, I didn’t find mention of this file or it’s purpose. It’s created by the ./flash.sh script, but without comment as to the purpose or why it contains what it does.

$ hexdump -C badpage.bin
00000000 4e 56 44 41 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |NVDA…|
00000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |…|
*
00000ba0 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |…|
00000bb0 42 49 4e 46 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |BINF…|
00000bc0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |…|
*
00001000

[kayccc]

Which Jetson platform and JetPack SW you’re using?

[gene.sally]

Hi Kayccc,
We don’t use jetpack. We build our own distribution via yocto and linuxfortegra, which is where we ran across this question.

[kayccc]

@gene.sally

We build our own distribution via yocto and linuxfortegra, which is where we ran across this question.

We dont’ have experience on this, may other developers help to provide suggestions.

[gene.sally]

Hi Kayccc,
I’m not requesting any help building our distribution. I’d like the documentation for this file, what it contains and why, so we understand all of the content in our distribution. I cannot locate any information about this file.

If this is information is proprietary or the file a mystery to nvidia, that’s OK, we just need to know.

[linuxdev]

I looked at one of the files on the host PC, and it is under the bootloader content, so it is used in boot. It is exactly 4096 bytes…which doesn’t mean a lot, but it seems to be entirely NULL bytes. Maybe it is some sort of space filler? Just a guess.