New board extensions not supported by VSCode nRF extension?

[pcspets]

Hello

When following the guidline of a new way to extend boards, VSCode "Add Build Configuration" is blank. Am I doing something wrong or this is not yet supported by nRF VSCode extension?

Attached is a sample project with the following "board.yaml":

board:
  extend: nrf52840dk
  variants:
    - name: test
      qualifier: nrf52840

extended_board_test.zip

[Kazi Afroza Sultana]

Hello,

You need to add extension in your kconfig for board file.

config BOARD_NRF52840DK
  select SOC_NRF52840_QIAA if BOARD_NRF52840DK_NRF52840_MY_EXTENSION

In your case it is ''test'

I have added the modified folder of the application, and you can try to run this.

nrf52840dk_test.zip

[pcspets]

Indeed, that did the trick. This is not documented.

But now there is another problem. I would like my "nrf52840dk_nrf52840_test.dts" to be an extendsion to 

"boards/nordic/nrf52840dk_nrf52840/nrf52840dk_nrf52840.dts". Seems that it is not automatically and however I try, I cannot #include it either. Your example board makes #include only to the base files.

[Kazi Afroza Sultana]

I talked to team and will get back to you soon.

[pcspets]

Hello

Have you had any reply from the team?

Lauri

[Sigurd]

Hi! Kazi is out of office, so I'm replying instead.

The CMake variable DTS_EXTRA_CPPFLAGS can be used to add more include paths, such as:
-isystem${ZEPHYR_BASE}/boards/nordic/nrf52840dk

The ideal place to set this variable would be pre_dt_board.cmake in the board extension directory. However, Zephyr doesn't source this file for board extensions. We have submitted a fix, but it needs more work before it's accepted: https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/pull/87821

Alternatively, DTS_EXTRA_CPPFLAGS can be set like any other CMake variable, e.g. before find_package(Zephyr) or on command-line. It's also one of the few variables allowed in snippets.

[pcspets]

Hello

Thank you, I almost got it working. Now the only trouble is that I cannot find a way how to set this variable for MCUBoot when using sysbuild. Do you have any idea?

Lauri

[Kazi Afroza Sultana]

Hello Lauri,

You may look at this Sysbuild (System build) documentation for both west and cmake.

[pcspets]

Couldn't find a good way how to define this include for MCUboot - so I finally decided to quick-temp-patch Zephyr and added

list(APPEND DTS_EXTRA_CPPFLAGS "-isystem$ENV{ZEPHYR_BASE}/boards")

to the correcponding board "pre_dt_board.cmake" in the Zephyr source tree.

But there is one more bug still. Debugging doesn't work if original board has already qualifiers. VSCode gives the following error message:

Invalid identifier for board 
file:///c%3A/ncs/v3.2.0/zephyr/boards/adafruit/feather_nrf52840

It can be easily reproduced with the following sample project:

extended_board_test_debug_fail_if_more_qualifiers.zip

This Adafruit board is a bit wrongly named ("nrf52840" is in the board name and second "nrf52840" is probably already treated as extra qualifier), but it doesn't matter, the same error comes when extending nRF91 *_ns board, for example.

[Kazi Afroza Sultana]

Hello, 

Can you show the build process on VSCode and also west? What is the board name you used for building the application?

[pcspets]

As can be seen in the example that I provided, the extended board name is "adafruit_feather_nrf52840/nrf52840/test". And it can be reprocuced with a standard sysbuild build process.