Mender upgrades across L4T releases (and yocto branches) are not currently supported

[dwalkes]

Partition layout changes on L4T releases have made this not trivial to support for older yocto branches.

Changes are coming with L4T version 32.6 which we may be able to leverage to upgrade from older branches, and no partition changes are planned from r32.5 (gatesgarth) forward at this time.

See OE4T meeting notes at this link and watch meeting updates in this link for more information.

See this sheet which tracks some combination of changes to partition layout between releases and has some references to associated xml files where these changes are tracked.

See this commit which backs out a feature to support u-boot environment partition migration between releases, which could be useful for TX2 u-boot based mender implementations.

[dwalkes]

See related thread at https://hub.mender.io/t/mender-standalone-update-from-warrior-to-zeus-or-dunfell/3516/8

[hoostol]

any updates on this issue?

[dwalkes]

Yes, there have been lots of discussions about this in Monthly meetings, see https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra/wiki/Over-the-air-reflashing-process and meeting notes starting from May at https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra/wiki/OE4T-Meeting-Notes---2021-05-13, especially https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra/wiki/OE4T-Meeting-Notes-2021-06-10

Most recent is probably OE4T/meta-tegra#798 and OE4T/tegra-demo-distro@6a582f6

Summary:

• Updates across the most recent L4T > r32.4.3 releases should work seamlessly, but we still need help testing these and porting changes across branches.
• Updates from any version should be possible (we've demonstrated from JP 3.3 successfully) but require some work, outlined in https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra/wiki/OE4T-Meeting-Notes-2021-06-10 and https://github.com/OE4T/meta-tegra/wiki/Over-the-air-reflashing-process.

[dwalkes]

One other related thread about making a more general solution can be found here:
OE4T/tegra-demo-distro#117