My team and I plan on getting our hands on a Toradex SOM (most likely an Apalis iMX8X) and do Yocto development on it. We went through the hands-on document for building Yocto images, and arrived at the part where we are told to follow the procedure documented in the Toradex Easy Installer article for image installation, and have a few questions in terms of how this would impact development work.
Is TEZI still available after we flash a custom Yocto image onto the board? Based on our understanding of the documented procedures, it is possible that we will have to reinstall TEZI via USB OTG, if we plan to flash another custom image after the first flash. In other words, does flashing via TEZI cause the preinstalled TEZI itself to be wiped from the board?
We foresee ourselves being in the same situation as this user in this thread, where the custom board we will be developing on may not include a USB OTG to load TEZI. We haven’t looked into other flashing methods yet, since TEZI seems to be the official way to do it. Would appreciate any advice we can get.
Installing an image overwrites the TEZI. Depending on your Carrier Board, the OTG reinstall may be a bit tricky due to the recovery pins, but always work.
Once you reinstall the TEZI, you can flash a new image from USB or server through the TEZI GUI.
In addition, I am not sure how the Apalis behave in relation to installation through SD, but on Colibri SDs are unreliable as an installation method (in my experience).
No doubt TEZI is helpful in production deployment, especially deploying in mass.
However, it is very inefficient that one have to reinstall TEZI every time when trying to install a new image for testing purpose, especially our custom carrier board doesn’t have the USB OTG port populated.
Besides having to plug the SoM into evaluation board to install TEZI onto it, is there any other approach that I can install OS image to the SoM without going through TEZI?
In addition to what other users have said. I will say Easy Installer isn’t strictly the only way to install an image onto our hardware. That being said Easy Installer is the only method we test and guarantee to work. I mean in theory as long as you can write the image files and filesystem to the device’s flash in a similar way as Easy Installer it should work.
Alternatively we use to have the ability to load Easy Installer from an SD card via distroboot. However this method has been unreliable as changes in memory usage/location with the i.MX8 line keep breaking this method. However it might be worth a try if it “just works” though last time I checked I think this method was still broken.
