DRIVE AGX Boot Flow#
NVIDIA system boot is divided into two major stages:
SOC system boot - initialize SOC co-processors and start the CPU bootloader
CPU boot - boot UEFI and the OS kernel
Here we provide some detail on the NVIDIA SOC system boot to facilitate development and debugging. Please note that some internal details may not be fully disclosed.
Three processors are primarily responsible for system boot:
BPMP - Boot and Power Management Processor
PSC - Platform Security Controller
CCPLEX - the CPU cluster complex
At power-on, the CCPLEX (CPU) is not powered on automatically. Instead, the BPMP and PSC processors are powered on and are responsible for initializing system hardware and booting the CPU.
Starting with Orin, the PSC (security co-processor) provides cryptographic hardware acceleration and key management for secure boot.
NVIDIA SOCs support secure boot and will verify the integrity and authenticity of all code up to the kernel / rootfs image being loaded. This is done using a two-stage secure boot signing scheme, where SOC bootloaders are co-signed by NVIDIA and the OEM, and CPU bootloaders and Boot Configuration Tables are signed by the OEM.
Upon power-up of the device, the boot flow sequence of events is as follows:
