Error when trying to add MCU BOOT functionality on a basic blinky example using Zephry/nRF Connect

RE: Error when trying to add MCU BOOT functionality on a basic blinky example using Zephry/nRF Connect

Vidar Berg — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:31:11 GMT

Good to hear. Yes, the Pinetime board is placing the secondary slot along with the storage partition in the external flash here: https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-zephyr/blob/588ae3982bb59bcedc0151cd6619c7672c53537d/boards/arm/pinetime_devkit0/pinetime_devkit0.dts#L151. However, if you want to do the same in the nRF Connect SDK, you need to do it through the Partition Manager as outlined in the Using external flash memory partitions section of the SDK documentation.

Note that you can check the current flash partition layout in your project by running the 'Memory report' action in the VS code extension.

RE: Error when trying to add MCU BOOT functionality on a basic blinky example using Zephry/nRF Connect

lcj — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:18:38 GMT

That worked. Thank you. It did build. I thought it might have to do with incorrect partitions which seem to be a requirement according to this article.

It states:

The first step required for Zephyr is making sure your board has flash partitions defined in its device tree. These partitions are:

boot_partition: for MCUboot itself
slot0_partition: the primary slot of Image 0
slot1_partition: the secondary slot of Image 0

While the pintime_devkit0.dts had:

&flash0 {
	partitions {
		compatible = "fixed-partitions";
		#address-cells = <1>;
		#size-cells = <1>;

		/* MCUboot bootloader */
		boot_partition: partition@0 {
			label = "mcuboot";
			reg = <0x00000000 0xc000>;
		};

		/* main firmware partition */
		slot0_partition: partition@c000 {
			label = "image-0";
			reg = <0x0000C000 0x74000>;
		};
	};
};

RE: Error when trying to add MCU BOOT functionality on a basic blinky example using Zephry/nRF Connect

Vidar Berg — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 12:53:05 GMT

Hello,

The problem is that the PineTime board enables the 'xt25fb32' flash NOR device on the spi1 bus by default in the devicetree, and the linker error is a result of the SPI driver not being included in the bootloader build.

Assuming you don't want to use this FLASH NOR device in your bootloader, you can create a devicetree overlay to disable the device for mcuboot. To apply a devicetree overlay for the child image, you can create a folder named 'chilld_image' in your project root with the 'mcuboot.overlay' file. Folder structure should be as follows (Permanent configuration changes to child images):

blinky_ble/child_image/
└── mcuboot.overlay

And the mcuboot.overlay should contain the following:

/delete-node/ &xt25fb32;

&spi1 {
    status = "disabled"; 
};

After you have adding the child_image folder with the mcuboot.overlay, you can perform a pristine build to ensure the overlay is applied to the mcuboot build.

Best regards,

Vidar