Create your own image for jetson nano board

Introduction

This article will guide you step by step to create a minimalist Ubuntu based image for your NVIDIA Jetson nano board that best suits your project.

Why would you build an image from scratch instead of using the official one ?

First, for fun. It's always interesting to build stuff from scratch as you always learn something in the process. Second, the official image is large in size (over 5GB 😱 ) and it's filled with lot of unnecessary preinstalled packages (ubuntu-desktop, browser ...) that takes lot of disk space and memory. So, let's create a clean and minimalist image.

Download the scripts

Before starting, let's first clone the repository where I put all the needed scripts.

$ git clone https://github.com/pythops/jetson-nano-image
$ cd jetson-nano-image

Create a rootfs

We're gonna use the script create-rootfs.sh to create a basic rootfs. First, we define the location where we want to build it. This is done by defining the environment variable $JETSON_ROOTFS_DIR. The path will be created if it does not exit.

$ export JETSON_ROOTFS_DIR=/path/to/rootfs

Then we build the rootfs by running the following command

$ sudo -E ./create-rootfs.sh
ROOTFS_DIR: ~/jetson-rootfs
Installing the dependencies...  [OK]
Creating rootfs directory...    [OK]
Downloading the base image...   [OK]
Run debootstrap first stage...  [OK]
Run debootstrap second stage... [OK]
Success!

-E option for sudo preserve the environment variables

Customize

Now that we have a basic rootfs, we're gonna customize it using one of my favorite tool ever: Ansible. For this step you need to have Ansible installed in your workstation. if it's not the case, just run this command and you're ready to go

$ pip install --user ansible

This Ansible role is going to do 3 things: * Install some basic tools (ssh, systemd, sudo ...) * Setup basic configurations (locales, network ...) * Add new user: pythops

You can run the playbook as follows

$ cd ansible
$ sudo -E $(which ansible-playbook) jetson.yaml

Feel free to adapt this role to your needs.

Create the image

Now that we customized the rootfs, we're gonna use the script create-image.sh to create our final image. We need to define a build directory using the environment variable $JETSON_BUILD_DIR. This path will be created if it does not exist.

$ export JETSON_BUILD_DIR=/path/to/build_dir

Then we build the image as follows

$ sudo -E ./create-image.sh

If all goes well, you'll get this message at the end

Image created successfully
Image location: /path/to/jetson.img

Flash on the sdcard

Finally we're gonna flash the image on the sdcard using the script flash-image.sh.

Insert your sdcard and run this command

$ sudo ./flash-image.sh /path/to/jetson.img /dev/mmcblk0
.
.
.
Success !
Your sdcard is ready !

the sdcard path /dev/mmcblk0 may be different in your system.

This script will automatically resize the root partition to occupy all the available space in the sdcard.

Congratulations 🎉 Now you can boot your board with the new image !

Nvidia Libraries

You can install Nvidia libraries using apt

$ sudo apt install -y cuda-toolkit-10-2 libcudnn8 libcudnn8-dev

Result

With the new image only 200MB of RAM is used, which leaves you with 3.8 GB for your projects !

  pythops   pythops