AGX Orin: 3rd-party carrier support & DTB persistence

Product support balenaOS
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Hi balena team,

As we move from prototyping toward larger deployments with the Jetson AGX Orin, we are struggling more and more to buy batches of the DevKit. This is forcing us to migrate to production modules and third-party carrier boards much sooner than we anticipated.

We have successfully flashed the AVerMedia D315 with balenaOS and deployed it using a fork of balena-jetson-orin and jetson-flash, masquerading it as a jetson-agx-orin-devkit device. While it is fully functional, we are hitting a major scalability roadblock: OTA OS updates break the device by overwriting the custom DTB file.

We are aware of the “Define the file name of the DTB to be used” configuration field. While this works for one-offs, manually managing unique DTB files across an expanding fleet isn’t scalable for production.

Few questions:

  • Are there plans to officially support common 3rd-party carrier boards for the AGX Orin (like the AVerMedia D315, Auvidea, Aetina)?

  • Is it possible to contribute support for these boards via PRs to meta-balena-jetson and jetson-flash? If we do, will balena maintain the device type, or does it require a commercial agreement/fee?

  • Is there a recommended way to perform OTA updates that preserves a custom DTB without manual intervention ?

On a personal note, we have a remaining stock of DevKits that will only last us another 3–6 months, so we are actively looking for a production-grade solution.

Thanks for the help !