Recovering Jetson FS from another ARM-based system

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TX2
1

Hello,

We’re trying to design a system whereby if the TX2 eMMC ever becomes corrupted and has to be recovered by tegrarcm, the only system that is available to host the recovery process is another ARM system. Is the source code to tegrarcm and friends set of tools available to the public, or at the very least is there a set of binaries cross-compiled for armhf?

Thanks!

2

hello nhandojo,

please refer to [TX2 Boot Flow] from the development guide.
we only public release cboot sources via Jetson Download Center.
thanks

3

Hello Jerry,

The scenario I would like to be able to recover from is one where the boot media is completely corrupted, but the device is, shall we say, deployed somewhere where there’s no x86 host to run tegraflash from.

I understand that BR runs mb1_recovery.bin in RCM mode? I would like to run the flashing programs (tegrarcm, tegrasign, etc) from another ARM Linux host to reflash the boot media.

Thanks,
Nick.

4

Hello Jerry,

Alternatively, would BR be able to use alternate copy of BR-BCT, effectively putting multiple copies of MB1 over different regions of the Boot Media to create some redundancy?

Thanks,
Nick.

5

hello nhandojo,

  1. TX2 support bootloader redundancy
    please refer to [NVIDIA Tegra Linux Driver Package]-> [Development Guide]-> [TX2 Bootloader Update and Redundancy]

  2. you may clone the TX2 and flash it from another ARM host.
    please refer to [NVIDIA Tegra Linux Driver Package]-> [Development Guide]-> [Flashing and Booting the Target Device]-> [To clone TX1/TX2 and flash]

6

Hello Jerry,

Thanks for pointing out the section on TX2 Bootloader Redundancy! Apparently I have been reading from an outdated Development Guide that did not have that section. Am now reading from rel 28.2.1.

Regarding your point #2, I still only see x86 binaries for tegrarcm_v2, et. al., so how do I run tegraflash from an ARM host? The nv_tools archive in nv_tegra distributed under L4T BSPs don’t seem to have any sources for these tools.

Thanks,
Nick.

7

Hello Jerry,

I’ve had a chance to play around a bit with the redundant boot scheme. I was able to see that even when some pages in the eMMC boot partition are overwritten, device still managed to boot. However the first 64 pages (BCT partition) isn’t duplicated anywhere, and a corruption in that partition would cause the device to fail to boot.

You mentioned there’s a way to reflash the device with another ARM-based system. I still haven’t been able to find this as all the flashing utilities are x86-based. Is there any way to recover corrupted BCT partition other than reflashing?

Thanks,
Nick.

8

@JerryChang
what is the current situation with recovering Jetsons from other ARM devices?
Thanks

9

hello Andrey1984,

I’m not see any feature updates about recovering Jetsons from other ARM devices.
currently, the default supported flashing process is still based-on x86 host machine, ubuntu-os.
thanks