Flashing Kairos successfully on NVIDIA Jetson OrinNX but not able to boot

[jordankrp]

Hi Kairos community,

Lately we have been trying to flash our NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX with Kairos. We have been going back and forth with our device supplier as they have their own L4T flasher files for JetPack 5.1.1. They advised to copy over some of their files to the Kairos L4T folder in order for the flashing to work and avoid the USB timeout error that you mention in your docs. The files are:

brla4n-orin-nx.conf
p3767.conf.common
kernel/dtb/tegra234-brla4n-orin-nx.dtb
bootloader/tegra234-mb1-bct-gpio-brla4n-orin-nx.dtsi
bootloader/tegra234-mb2-bct-common.dtsi
bootloader/t186ref/BCT/tegra234-mb2-bct-misc-p3767-0000.dts
bootloader/t186ref/BCT/tegra234-mb1-bct-pinmux-brla4n-orin-nx.dtsi
rootfs/usr/sbin/flash_erase
rootfs/usr/sbin/mtd_debug

Since the Orin NX uses an NVMe block as its root device (and not eMMC), we do not use the command described in your docs for the AGX Orin, but we use NVIDIA's l4t_initird_flash.sh flashing tool (which seems to come with Kairos L4T). The command we use for flashing the NVMe (see NVIDIA docs) from our host laptop (Ubuntu 20.04 and kernel version 5.15.0-122-generic) through USB is:

sudo ./tools/kernel_flash/l4t_initrd_flash.sh --external-device nvme0n1p1 -c tools/kernel_flash/flash_l4t_external.xml -p "-c bootloader/t186ref/cfg/flash_t234_qspi.xml" --showlogs --network usb0 brla4n-orin-nx internal

This works fine and according to the logs produced flash_3-4_0_20241004-135320.log the flashing procedure is successful. However the device is not bootable: we get the setup screen if we press Esc in the beginning, and then we can select the bootloader as shown.

Both the Generic Ultra Fast Media and the 960GB PCIe drive are not able to boot the device.

We suspect it is something with the bootloader files in the Kairos L4T folder (even though we have replaced / copied over some as you can see above) or some device tree mismatch. Our provider has exhausted all their options so we would be grateful if you could provide us with some help on the issue. Please let us know if you need more information from our side. We aim to flash Kairos with JetPack 5.1.1 (L4T version 35.3.1).