Xavier NX Development Kit power on off Resilience

Hi,

I wanted to understand what are the side effects of turning on and off the Xavier NX development kit without proper shutdown of the device. Will, there be any major implication on the system and if there are is there any solution that I can implement for the following case.

For me, it’s a case which can happen 5-6 times a day as my system is running on a battery, and in case of charging the system will switch off the power and hence leading to the Xavier not being turned off properly.

Naman

@naman.vaidya

Is power turned off when battery voltage is low or abruptly cutoff as soon as charger is plugged in? Please share more details about your battery and charger circuit.

In our case, there are two scenarios, one where the emergency switch is pressed and there is an abrupt power cutoff.

In the second case, we will switch it off in case the battery voltage is low and for now I am not informing the system and it can also be considered as an abrupt shutdown.

I’ll be working over Christmas on releasing new security software for running with jetson GPUs. But part of the release will configure the OS to run with a read-only mounted OS with a memory overlay as well as booting on SSD with a read-write mounted partition. It will also be configured to repair any damage to the read-write partition which every boot. Stay tuned for the announcement over the Christmas period.

This should given you resilience against any damage from unexpected power cuts.

Cheers,
Kim Hendrikse, The Netherlands

@naman.vaidya
Abrupt power off may not damage the dev-kit HW, but it is not recommended for products developed using Xavier-NX. It will lead to data loss and also IO peripherals connected to base board may be damaged. The power off must follow the shutdown sequence provided in NX module datasheet. It is safe to trigger SW shutdown or press and hold power button for 10seconds to forcefully shutdown system power.

Thanks a lot, Kim that sounds comforting. I will make sure till that update is launched our Xavier is turned off properly.

Thanks a lot, @rkasirajan I thought the same that it can lead to data damages, I will ensure that no abrupt turn off is done. But if its not frequent then it should not be a problem right?

Not frequent no, but it happens. I’ve seen it happen maybe 3-4 times in the last year. It can be recovered ok, but the problem is that mostly this will be deployed without keyboard and monitor and the fsck system is very cautious, mostly it will want to interact with the user which when the keyboard is missing means that it just hangs.

In my case, the OS runs read-only so that never gets corrupted with power offs and the data directly is not nearly so critical. I’m happy to let fsck do it’s best to fix it. The OS and the application will still come up correctly.

BTW. I’ve finished my code changes to make a stable platform, but I’m waiting till I implement the second part, which is using these changes as a platform for my security application before uploading it to github. I expect this will be before the end of January.

It provides a single command to run to change the system from running on SD card to booting to SSD with an memory based overlayFS for the OS.

Cheers,
Kim Hendrikse