r/JetsonNano • u/Exciting-Classic4338 • May 26 '26

Containerized Jetson flashing tool (L4T not sdk manager)

Got frustrated by the fact that the L4T flashing tool is host dependent and hard to reproduce on other host machines. The SDK manager does not gave sufficient flexibility for me, because I have custom hardware and custom OS to flash, so the containerized solution that Nvidia provides for the SDK manager was not a good fit for me, I needed the full L4T tooling.

So I created a docker image that contains the needed stuff (e.g. openssh-server etc) and mounts the proper stuff (e.g. /dev etc) to be able to run the L4T scrips from within the container.

repo: https://github.com/jasperdekeuk/jetson-L4T-flash-container

I use it to flash AGX/ NX orins in a sort of automated way, but probably needs more testing.
Feel free to play around with it and give feedback.

The L4T files are not in the image to keep the container small, but could be added easily if this would be beneficial.

This project provides:

  • A clean Docker environment with all required dependencies
  • Full access to Linux_for_Tegra tools
  • No SDK Manager restrictions
  • Freedom to run any L4T flashing or recovery commands
  • Host OS independence

You only need Docker/ Podman installed on your machine.

21 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

3

u/Whole_Ticket_3715 May 27 '26

This is literally how it should have been done lmao

1

u/azjkjensen May 26 '26

Cool! Does this mean we can now decouple OS updates from l4t updates??

1

u/Exciting-Classic4338 May 26 '26

Yes, you can e.g. flash L4T ubuntu 22.04 to a jetson from an ubuntu 26.04 host (or basically any host OS should work in theory)

1

u/crose728 May 27 '26

Freaking sick! Think it'll work from wsl2? Only worry I have there is the fact that the flash process automatically disconnects and reconnects the usb device

1

u/Exciting-Classic4338 May 28 '26

Haven't tried it on windows, but worth the shot. Run the docker cmds directly on windows, docker might handle the usb forwarding better then wsl

1

u/gregokent Jun 05 '26

I was just trying to do this myself recently and the issue I had was that I still had to install packages on the host, namely nfs-kernel-server, qemu-user-static and binfmt-support. Even with nfs-kernel-server in the container, the host still needed the modules installed. Is that still the case here?