Research needed hardware support from manufacturer

[renkh]

The target hardware is AAEON BOXER-8240AI that comes with AGX Xavier. Research what hardware components this box has, features, and support needed for this to work with meta-tegra.

blockers: Get a hold of AAEON SDK in issue #3

COS:

• [x] Main hardware components identified
• [x] meta-tegra support identified

[renkh]

Found a tegra194-p2888-0001-p2822-0000.dtb file in the AAEON factory firmware image containing the device tree information specific to the Jetson AGX Xavier hardware configuration.

Looking at the DTB file this supports:

• tegra194: based on the NVIDIA Xavier (Tegra 194) SoC development board.
• p2888-0001: some type of hardware revision or variant of the Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit.

Looking around on Linux Tegra, I found that Jetson Linux R32.7.1 Release Page has a L4T Driver Package (BSP) driver which is very similar to AAEON factory firmware image.

I believe AAEON is running a version of L4T Driver Package (BSP) driver on top of some custom Unix based OS. If I can find some similarities to a well supported board like the Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit, I can simply use that meta-tegra layer to flash a running Yocto image on the AAEON.

[renkh]

Searching the meta-tegra repo I found a jetson-agx-xavier-devkit.conf file that has the tegra194-p2888-0001-p2822-0000.dtb listed as a KERNEL_DEVICETREE. This is part of the MACHINE definitions for NVIDIA's Jetson development kits.

The tegra dtb file is part of the flashing script found in issue #3 so this all but confirms that the file contains information specific to Jetson AGX Xavier development kit's hardware configuration that I can use on the AAEON box.

[renkh]

meta-tegra has a Creating a custom MACHINE wiki page and gives examples on how to develop for a custom carrier board. I will probably modify a default boot-time configuration for Jetson AGX Xavier.

The wiki states that Jetson AGX Xavier systems are similar to Jetson-TX2 and I should refer to Jetson-TX2 section for information on how to integrate custom files into the build.

The main points are:

• there are machine-specific boot-time configuration files that need to be customized according to the Platform Adaptation Guide documentation. These customizations include the BPMP device tree and the MB1 .cfg files for pinmux, PMIC, PMC, boot ROM, and other on-module hardware.
• The tegra-flashvars_.bb recipe installs a file called flashvars that identifies the boot-time configuration files to be processed by the tegra186-flash-helper script for use with NVIDIA's flashing tools. A customized copy of the flashvars file should be supplied in the BSP layer, and the files listed in that file must be installed into ${datadir}/tegraflash in the build sysroot using another recipe.
• The tegra-bootfiles recipe in meta-tegra extracts the files for the Jetson development kits from the L4T (Linux for Tegra) BSP (Board Support Package) package.
• When upgrading the L4T BSP, it is important to review any changes related to configuration files and variables required, as they may vary between different versions.

For this project I will avoid forking and patching the kernel sources.