nRF54L15dk working with external flash and partition managed

[Vojislav]

Hi, 

I am having trouble setting up the partition manager in external flash with nRF54L15dk in NCS 3.0.0. I did not find any examples of this working. Interesting thing is that for machine_learning example application in NCS you can see nRF54H20 utilize this, but not nRF54L15dk, not sure why is that the case. 

Best regards,
Vojislav

[Priyanka]

Hello,

Sorry for the slight delay in responding ,  it's summer vacation period here, which caused some delays.

Could you please share a few more details? For example, which external flash module are you using? How is the partition file being configured? If you're unsure about configuring the pm_static.yml file, I recommend building without a static partition first. This will generate a dynamic partition layout, which you can then use as a reference to configure the static partition.

Are the logs you shared from the sample I pointed out? I'm not sure if this is a known issue, but I will look into it as well.

-Priyanka

[Vojislav]

Hi Priyanka 

Here are the detailes:
* which external flash module are you using? -> the one that is on PCA10156 (v0.9.1 - 2024.44) I assume that one is MX25R6435F
* How is the partition file being configured? -> 

app:
  address: 0x10200
  region: flash_primary
  size: 0xdfe00
mcuboot:
  address: 0x0
  region: flash_primary
  size: 0x10000
mcuboot_pad:
  address: 0x10000
  region: flash_primary
  size: 0x200
mcuboot_primary:
  address: 0x10000
  orig_span: &id001
  - mcuboot_pad
  - app
  region: flash_primary
  size: 0xe0000
  span: *id001
mcuboot_primary_app:
  address: 0x10200
  orig_span: &id002
  - app
  region: flash_primary
  size: 0xdfe00
  span: *id002
settings_storage:
  address: 0xf0000
  region: flash_primary
  size: 0x10000
mcuboot_primary_1:
  address: 0x0
  size: 0x40000
  device: flash_ctrl
  region: ram_flash
mcuboot_secondary:
  address: 0x00000
  size: 0xe0000
  device: MX25R64
  region: external_flash
mcuboot_secondary_1:
  address: 0xe0000
  size: 0x40000
  device: MX25R64
  region: external_flash
external_flash:
  address: 0x120000
  size: 0x6e0000
  device: MX25R64
  region: external_flash
pcd_sram:
  address: 0x20000000
  size: 0x2000
  region: sram_primary

Yes, logs from the previous post are from your sample, you can find the link to the application I build with NCS 3.3.0 there as well, and a comment that for nRF54L15DK this is nor working. 

Let me know if I can give any more details. 

Cheers,
Vojislav

[Priyanka]

Hi,

I will forward the case to a colleague of mine who has better knowledge about this. He will help you out.

-Priyanka

[Menon]

Hello Vojislav,

I'll look into this issue from here on. I tried building the sample from the nRF Developer Academy course, and it works fine on my end. I think you may have missed updating the overlay file name provided with the solution.

In the solution, they’ve included overlays for two flash modules, one for &mx25r64 and one for &gd25wb256. You need to remove the one you're not using and rename the overlay files (both for the application and for MCUboot) accordingly. Please see the screenshot below.

I have removed the files app_gd.overlay and mcuboot_gd.overlay from the application.

You can ignore the .yml file, as it's used for Twister tests and the VS Code extension. It won't affect your build.

Kind Regards,

Abhijith