NVIDIA Jetson Orin - Flashing the Board from Cmdline

This section provides a guide to flash the Jetson Orin OS components from the host computer command line. Flashing is the process of copying the files required into the selected storage from which the Orin is going to boot. In the flashing process, we use the host computer and the Orin.

This section assumes that you already have followed through our Getting Started and Installing Jetpack sections.

Assumptions

You have Jetpack 5.0.x installed on your host computer in the default path ($HOME/nvidia/nvidia_sdk/JetPack_5.0.1_DP_Linux_JETSON_AGX_ORIN_TARGETS/Linux_for_Tegra). If your Jetpack installation used a different path, make sure to modify accordingly the JETPACK environment variable in Step 1.

The OS components to be installed in the Orin AGX are stored in the default locations expected by the Jetpack flash script. If you haven't modified your Jetpack directory or if you followed our Compiling Code Section, then the files should be in the default locations. If you have the files stored in a custom location, make sure to use the appropriate flags to indicate to the flash script the paths to the kernel, dtb, and bootloader.

Step 1: Define the Environment Variables

Make sure to run the following commands in the terminal that you will use to flash the Orin.

export JETPACK=$HOME/nvidia/nvidia_sdk/JetPack_5.0.1_DP_Linux_JETSON_AGX_ORIN_TARGETS/Linux_for_Tegra

Step 2: Set Board in Recovery Mode

In order to flash the Orin, we must set it in recovery mode so that it can accept the files. The procedure to put the Orin in recovery mode is:

Start with the Jetson Orin AGX devkit turned off and disconnected from the power supply.
Get the USB-A to USB-C cable and connect the USB-A end to your host computer (the computer where you installed Jetpack) and the USB-C end to the Orin type C port L, shown in Figure 2.
Press and hold the FORCE RECOVERY button (B in Figure 1).
While pressing the FORCE RECOVERY button, press and release the RESET button (C in Figure 1).

Figure 1: Recovery Mode Buttons	Figure 2: USB-C Port for Flashing

At this point, the Orin should be in recovery mode. To verify, you can run the following command on your host computer:

lsusb

If the Orin is in recovery mode, you should see a line similar to the following among the command output:

Bus 001 Device 011: ID 0955:7023 NVidia Corp

Step 3 (Optional): Create a Default User

The default user/password can be configured after flashing if you can connect a display, keyboard, and mouse to the Orin to complete the OEM configuration during the first boot. If you wish to save time and create a default user/password for your Orin before flashing, you can execute the commands below, make sure to replace <user_name> and <password> for a username and password of your choice.

 cd $JETPACK/tools
 sudo ./l4t_create_default_user.sh -u <user_name> -p <password>

Step 4: Execute the Flash Script

NVIDIA provides a script for flashing the Orin in the Jetpack directory. This script takes two arguments, the target board, and the root device:

sudo ./flash.sh <target board> <rootdev>

There are four possible options of target board for the Orin AGX:

jetson-agx-orin-devkit: Recommended, this configuration is used for a Jetson AGX Orin SOM connected to the NVIDIA AGX Orin devkit.
jetson-agx-orin-devkit-as-jao-40w: This configuration is used to emulate a Jetson Orin NX 32GB module on a Jetson AGX Orin SOM connected to the NVIDIA AGX Orin devkit.
jetson-agx-orin-devkit-as-nx-16gb: This configuration is used to emulate a Jetson Orin NX 16GB module on a Jetson AGX Orin SOM connected to the NVIDIA AGX Orin devkit.
jetson-agx-orin-devkit-as-nx-8gb: This configuration is used to emulate a Jetson Orin NX 8GB module on a Jetson AGX Orin SOM connected to the NVIDIA AGX Orin devkit

In the following subsections, we are going to use the jetson-agx-orin-devkit configuration to flash the Orin.

The root device indicates the storage that will be used to boot the Orin, the following options are available:

eMMC
USB Drive
NVMe

The following subsections show the command to flash each of the storage options available.

Option #1: eMMC

This option is the most simple, just execute the following commands:

cd $JETPACK
sudo ./flash.sh jetson-agx-orin-devkit mmcblk0p1

The flashing process will take a while, and should print a success message if the flash is finished successfully. After the flash script finishes successfully, the Orin will boot automatically

Option #2: USB Drive

This option requires copying the OS components to the USB.

Prepare the USB Drive

First, you will need to identify the mount point of the USB Drive. To do so, you can run the following command before and after connecting the USB Drive to your host computer and identify the new line that appears:

mount

The mount command will print a list of block devices and the mountpoint. For example, in our case, the following line wasn't printed by mount before connecting the USB Drive but was printed by mount after the USB Drive was connected:

/dev/sdd1 on /media/$USER/bde7a526-1b2d-4ad3-925f-4650b2563ab7 type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uhelper=udisks2)

This indicates that the block device for the USB Drive is /dev/sdd1.

Now that the block device of the USB Drive has been identified, you can format the USB drive in your host computer using the commands below. Make sure to replace </dev/sdX> with your actual device.

umount </dev/sdX>
sudo mkfs.ext4 </dev/sdX>

At this point, you can proceed to copy the files to the USB drive. This can take a while because around 6GB need to be copied:

 cd $JETPACK
 sudo mkdir tmp_system
 sudo mount </dev/sddX> $JETPACK/tmp_system
 cd rootfs/
 sudo cp -a * $JETPACK/tmp_system && sync

When the copy finishes, you can proceed to umount the USB Drive with the following command:

sudo umount $JETPACK_DIR/tmp_system

At this point, you can disconnect the USB Drive.

Flash

Connect the USB Drive where you copied the files to the Jetson AGX Orin. Then, flash the board with the following commands:

 cd $JETPACK
 sudo ./flash.sh jetson-agx-orin-devkit sda1 #it can be another mount point

After the flash script finishes successfully, the Orin will boot automatically.