NVIDIA Jetpack Flashing with initrd

Introduction

This wiki provides a guide for using NVIDIA's initrd flashing procedure provided since Jetpack 4.6.

This is a streamlined way of flashing to internal or external media. The procedure works by first flashing a minimal initrd, which boots up and exposes the internal and external media to the host for flashing. This flashing procedure is much faster compared to other flashing techniques. For instance, in the case of Jetson Xavier NX which needs to flash SPI + EMMC, with initd both can be flashed in parallel. Another advantage of this feature is that it provides one solution to flash internal or external media.

Tools and instructions for flashing with initrd may be found in the directory /Linux_for_Tegra/‌tools/‌kernel_flash/. For more detailed information, see README_initrd_flash.txt in the same directory. Also, we encourage you to read the NVIDIA Jetson Linux Developer Guide for Jetpack 4.6.

Feature support table
Board	Flashing with initrd
Jetson TX2	No
Xavier AGX	Yes
Xavier NX	Yes
Jetson Nano	No

Requirements

• High-quality USB‑C / micro-USB cable. A low-quality cable may make the flashing process fail.
• NetworkManager is required by the host to configure the network for flashing, not some other network management application.
• Automount must temporarily be disabled for the new external storage device during flashing.

Procedure

1. Disable automount

systemctl stop udisks2.service

2. Install dependencies

sudo apt install libxml2-utils simg2img network-manager abootimg sshpass device-tree-compiler

3. Put the Jetson Board in recovery mode and plug it into your computer.

4. Please go to the Target HW image folder created by the NVIDIA SDK manager after downloading the required Jetpack. By default it will be located at /home/$USER/nvidia/nvidia_sdk.

cd /home/$USER/nvidia/nvidia_sdk

5. Navigate to the corresponding Jetpack directory.

cd JetPack_4.6_<board>

6. Navigate to the Linux_for_Tegra directory.

cd Linux_for_Tegra

7. Start the initrd flashing procedure

sudo ./tools/kernel_flash/l4t_initrd_flash.sh <board-name> <rootdev>

Where:

• <board-name> is the value of the environment variable BOARD for the target device. According to the currently supported devices, you can use: jetson-xavier-nx-devkit, jetson-xavier-nx-devkit-emmc or jetson-agx-xavier-devkit.

• <rootdev> specifies the type of device that is to be flashed. Use the value mmcblk0p1 to flash a local storage device (eMMC or SD card, depending on platform), as distinguished from NFS server, for example.

8. Once the flashing procedure is done, you can enable automount service

systemctl start udisks2.service‏‏