Flashing Images

meta-pantavisor produces a bootable image for every supported machine. This page is a map of how to get that image onto real hardware — where to get a ready-made image, which tool to flash it with, and which method applies to your board.

What a Yocto build produces

A KAS/Yocto build of pantavisor-starter (see Starter Image) outputs two different kinds of artifact in build/tmp-${codename}/deploy/images/${machine}/, and each is consumed differently:

• .wic (plus its compressed variants .wic.bz2 / .wic.gz / .wic.zst) — a complete, flashable disk image: partition table, bootloader, and a rootfs with an initial signed Pantavisor trail already populated. This is what you write to a device's storage (SD card, eMMC, NAND) the first time, before it can boot Pantavisor at all. This page is about that step.
• .pvrexport.tgz (a pvrexport) — a tarball of one state part (an app container or the BSP), built per-recipe and mixed into the .wic's initial trail at image-build time (see Build artifacts and How the image is assembled). The same pvrexports are what Pantavisor deploys after first boot: pvtx, the device web UI, or pvr can post a new pvrexport to an already-running device, and Pantavisor commits it as a new trail revision — this is how OTA updates work, with no reflashing involved.

In short: .wic gets a device booting Pantavisor for the first time; .pvrexport tarballs are how every update reaches it afterward. The rest of this page covers the .wic side — initial flashing.

Get an image: pantavisor.io/downloads

pantavisor.io/downloads is the fastest way to get a Pantavisor image without building one yourself. It lists official release channels (stable, release-candidate) and versions for all supported boards, ready to flash.

The downloads page also distributes pvflasher, Pantacor's open-source flashing tool (GUI and CLI, Linux/Windows/macOS). Its GUI includes an integrated release browser — pick a channel, version, and device profile, then download and flash in one step, without leaving the app.

Choose your flashing method

Target	Method	Guide
Most boards (SD card slot)	Write a .wic image with pvflasher or dd	SD Card
Toradex Colibri / Verdin	UUU + pv-flash-bundle (factory flash, no host uuu install)	Flashing Toradex Modules
NXP i.MX EVK / SOM (Variscite, MEK)	UUU + pv-flash-bundle	Flashing via NXP uuu
Local development, no hardware	Docker	Docker / Local Target

Board-specific wiring, boot-mode switches, and install notes for each supported board live under Board Guides.

For the NXP i.MX boards (Toradex and Variscite), pv-flash-bundle is the preferred flashing method — see Flashing NXP devices for how the recipe assembles the self-contained factory-flash archive.

Verifying a flash

pvflasher verify re-checks a flashed SD card against the image's block map (.bmap) without re-flashing — useful for confirming a card before shipping a device. See SD Card for the full pvflasher CLI/GUI walkthrough.