Boot Jetson Xavier from M.2 NVMe SSD
Compared with Jetson Nano, an important feature comes with Jetson Xavier NX is its M.2 Key M connector. I believe many of you have already installed an SSD on it, just like me. But you must have wondered or searched whether Xavier can boot from the SSD. As shown in the screenshot, reading speed from my SSD is 7 times faster than the SD card. Thus, to boot from SSD will surely boost the performance of Jetson Xavier.
And here is how to make it happen.
Step 1. Format the SSD you have installed
Install your and SSD and boot, then open the menu and search disk.
Launch the disk app, you’ll see this.
Mine is a 240 GB SSD. The size of your partition3 depends on the SSD you installed. Then press ctrl + F to start formatting your SSD.
When you see this, click Format to continue. Then you’ll get a 240 GB free space.
Now let’s
Choose the size of your main partition. I suggest you leave 16 GB for swap file.
Give your volume a name. Then click Create. Then you’ll see this coming.
Now you have successfully created a volume. But it’s not mounted yet. Let’s mount it using shell command. Fortunately, Jetsonhacks have already integrated those commands into a shell script. Let’s run it to make Xavier boot from SSD.
Step 2. Copy the rootfs from SD card to SSD
Firstly, clone the project.
git clone https://github.com/jetsonhacks/rootOnNVMe.gitcd rootOnNVMe
Then copy rootfs file to your SSD
./copy-rootfs-ssd.sh
Step 3. Enable booting from SSD
Run ./setup-service.sh and reboot to make the service come into effect.
Explaining
The basic idea of these steps is to copy rootfs from SD/emmc to SSD. After the system has loaded the image from SD/emmc, the boot process will be transferred to SSD. This is how you can make Xavier to boot from SSD. But remember, if you are using Xavier NX, you still need SD card plugged in order to boot the device cause NX doesn’t allow you to boot directly from SSD.
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