Jumping from Nvidia based flash to Yocto based flash OTA.

[trulsko]

Hi,
I migrated from using NVIDIA’s rootfs and systems to flash and update, over to Yocto and swupdate.
After getting it up and running with the custom hardware we have, it works like a charm when freshly flashed using a Yocto build.

However, I have units that I can only access over the network, so I need to find a way to migrate OTA, and I am not sure if it even is possible.

I am using a Jetson AGX Orin 32 GB with a Forcer carrier board on the Scarthgap branch. My in-field units are based on L4T R35.4, which also means I have to first jump to R35.5 and then R36.x.

So what I tried so far was doing a normal NVIDIA OTA update to R35.5 — no issues there. But then I try to build an R35.5 to R36.4 OTA package using Yocto files, like so:

sudo ROOTFS_AB=1 SKIP_REC_IMG=1 ./tools/ota_tools/version_upgrade/l4t_generate_ota_package.sh \
 -o custom_rootfs_updater.sh \
 -f /test-release-update-test-machine.rootfs-20251206230212.tar.gz \
 -p "-K /Image -I /tegra-minimal-initramfs-test-machine.cpio.gz -d /tegra234-p3737-0000+p3701-0004-nv-dsboard-agx-base.dtb" \
 jetson-agx-orin-devkit R36-4

Which seems to work okay-ish. At least it runs the bootloader update and boots into the rootfs fine.

However, when then running swupdate to get to the full normal Yocto image, it runs fine and says update successful, and I reboot… and nothing. No bootloader update, no nothing. The filesystem gets placed correctly, but the DTB is not updated, so I am missing the overlays needed, etc.

So I am not sure what I am missing, or what would be the correct strategy to do this.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.