RE: secure bootloader linker - migrating from SES to GCC

ms360 — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 17:22:20 GMT

Thanks Vidar. I just figured it out using your recommended method.
I first thought it was optlevel, but by digging in there I found the root cause.
My Makefile had float printf enabled, my SES project did not.

RE: secure bootloader linker - migrating from GCC to SES

Vidar Berg — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:14:53 GMT

Hello,

I couldn’t find any errors in the linker script you posted. It seems that the bootloader image is simply too large to fit in the allocated region. The 'reserved' section used by SES is just a placeholder to indicate that the area is reserved for the application and softdevice. This section is not required and it can easily be removed by editing the flash_placement.xml file which is the file SES generates the linker script from.

Please try to increase the bootloader FLASH region with a couple of flash pages to allow the build to succeed, then compare the *.map files from the SES and pure GCC build to see if you can determine what part is making the GCC image that much bigger. Maybe it has to do with the C libs.

Also, this may not be directly related to your issue, but there was an error in the flash_placement.xml configuration in an older SDK version. This error would prevent you from getting a linker error if the bootloader code grew into the mbr_params_page and bootloader_settings_page sections. These sections need to be placed in the FLASH region, as shown below.

Best regards,

Vidar