A206 Carrier Board Not Booting from NVME

Products & Technology Hardware Products for AIoT Applications
#1

I have an A206 Jetson Xavier NX Carrier board

Following this guide: A20X Carrier Board - Seeed Wiki

I was able to flash the 16GB EMMC. The A206 comes with a NVME drive, in my case, 128GB of storage.
I’d like to boot from the NVME, since the EMMC is not large enough for the SDK components we’re using. The above guide recommends using the jetsonhacks/rootonNVME script, from a repo that hasn’t been maintained for 2 years. Here: GitHub - jetsonhacks/rootOnNVMe: Switch the rootfs to a NVMe SSD on the Jetson Xavier NX and Jetson AGX Xavier

Since then, the NVIDIA SDK allows for NVME flashing directly in the utility. When I use that feature, the NVME seems to complete a flash, but upon boot, the A206 will not complete a boot. The Nvidia SDK continues to “wait for boot”, with a black screen and a single white blinking cursor.

I tried flashing from the command line, using NVIDIAs flash.sh script. I flashed both the EMMC and NVME successfuuly, according to the script, but the A206 will not boot (black screen).

In all cases, I jump pins 3-4 to enter manual flash mode, flash the disk, then remove the pin on bootup. Still, a blank screen.

This forum post mentions removing a resistor on the A206 when using an Xavier NX with this board. Is that a requirement? Will that help in my scenario?

Will the A206 support booting from the NVME with Nvidia’s SDK Manager? The store page mentions the board is nearly identical to Nvidia’s Xavier Development Kit board.

Thanks for your support.

#2

I’m a new user, so I can’t post more than 2 links in my initial post. Here’s the link to the Nvidia forum post that mentions removing the resistor from the A206 to improve boot reliability for the Xavier NX: Leetop A206 Carrier Board boot issues & boot unreliability based on temperature - Jetson AGX Xavier - NVIDIA Developer Forums

#3

The combination of A206+NX can flash the system directly into it by selecting ssd inside the SDK manager.

#4

Thanks, but the SDK manager has 4 options.

  1. EMMC/SD Card
  2. NVME
  3. USB
  4. Other

Can you please elaborate on your reply?

#5

Please just select NVME

#6

Does this work with Jetpack 5.0.2 on Ubuntu 20.04?

UPDATE: I was able to finally get Jetpack 5.0.2 to flash to the NVMe on the reComputer, Xavier NX, and the A206 carrier board. Not sure if this is repeatable, but I used an 18.04 VM instead of 20.04 host, ran sdkmanager on the eMMC first and then ran it again on the NVMe.

The only problem is that it goes through all of the boot options before trying the NVMe drive. By this, I mean it tries to boot from the Ethernet card using IPV6 then IPV4 then PXE and then finally the NVMe. Anybody know how to change the boot order?