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I've created images for the Jetson nano using the meta-tegra layer and flashed it so my jetson nano with a 32gb sd-card. When building an image, the default size of the .sdcard file that is needed to be flashed to the SD-card, is about 16GB .

It seems very overkill to have a very VERY basic image, with a root file system .sdcard file with the size of 16GB.

After flashing, the SD-card is split into 13 parts, as seen from gparted:

gparted screenshot

When booting the device, I have 1.83gb to use... on a 32gb sd-card with a extremely basic image...

I can see there is 13.66gb free on the sdb13 part, but while able to unallocated the space from the sdb13 part, I am unable to allocate it to the sdb1 part due to error. This is however not the point of this post.

Why is file size so big?- and is there any way to somehow minimize this size?

Varyag
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  • You can use [bmaptool](https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/latest/mega-manual/mega-manual.html#flashing-images-using-bmaptool) to flash devices, it will optimize process by skipping zeros. You can also reduce rootfs with [IMAGE_ROOTFS_SIZE](https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/latest/mega-manual/mega-manual.html#var-IMAGE_ROOTFS_SIZE). – Nayfe Sep 20 '19 at 11:35
  • After zipping the sdcard image file, I found out only 577mb of the 16gb is content and the rest is zeros so maybe the bmaptool is a good way to go. – Varyag Sep 20 '19 at 12:04
  • This is unfortunately not easy to fix. You can change TEGRAFLASH_SDCARD_SIZE in conf/machine/jetson-nano.conf and if you build again the .sdcard will have a corresponding size, but for some reason which I don't understand the jetson-nano does not boot after making this change (the init process exits and this causes a kernel panic). – Étienne Dec 16 '19 at 16:12
  • One thing you can do is use bmaptool to flash the image, this will be a lot faster than copying the 16GB with dd. – Étienne Dec 16 '19 at 17:00
  • See also https://github.com/madisongh/meta-tegra/issues/207 – Étienne Dec 16 '19 at 17:03

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