nRF54L15 reduce build time

[Ryan S]

Hi,

I assume this would apply to most new boards - but I am finding that the build time since upgrading to newer hardware has increased significantly. Perhaps due to sysbuild and the the psa_crypto_config related steps?

For development, I am not concerned about security or anything sophisticated with the bootloader as I just want to test my project. 

Are there any configs I can enable/disable to drastically reduce compilation time?

The terminal below shows the number of build steps for the nrf/blinky

-- west build: building application
[4/259] Generating include/generated/zephyr/version.h
-- Zephyr version: 4.0.99 (D:/ncs/v3.0.1/zephyr), build: v4.0.99-ncs1-1
[259/259] Linking C executable zephyr\zephyr.elf
Memory region         Used Size  Region Size  %age Used
           FLASH:       30716 B      1428 KB      2.10%
             RAM:        6128 B       188 KB      3.18%
        IDT_LIST:          0 GB        32 KB      0.00%
Generating files from C:/blinky_2/build/blinky_2/zephyr/zephyr.elf for board: nrf54l15dk
[10/10] Generating ../merged.hex
 *  Terminal will be reused by tasks, press any key to close it. 

Thank you. 

[SwRa]

Hi Ryan,

A few seps you can incorporate into your application to reduce the build time as well as optimize the memory are as follows:

1. If you don't need MCUboot or other secondary images for development, you can disable them by removing or commenting out related Kconfig options in your prj.conf: CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_MCUBOOT=n

2. If you are not concerned about security during development, you can disable related features in your prj.conf to skip unnecessary configuration and build steps. Eg: CONFIG_MBEDTLS_PSA_CRYPTO_C=n and CONFIG_MBEDTLS_USE_PSA_CRYPTO=n

3. Use minimal build configuration: (For simple applications like Blinky, you can use a minimal prj.conf to reduce the number of drivers, features, and threads included in the build. )

4. Avoid pristine build as discussed in this thread:  build time with west for zephyr projects : how to re-build without the 'build setup' phase eg when just recompiling C files  

5. You can also configure your project to not sysbuild by default whenever invoking   west build. See here: docs.nordicsemi.com/.../sysbuild_configuring_west.html

Regards,

Swathy