nRF54L15 + MCUboot + External flash with SQSPI: VPR problems

RE: nRF54L15 + MCUboot + External flash with SQSPI: VPR problems

Simonr — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 07:07:07 GMT

I've reported this internally now, and we will be looking at how to add a proper cleanup of the sQSPI in MCUBoot. Thank you for your report!

Best regards,

Simon

RE: nRF54L15 + MCUboot + External flash with SQSPI: VPR problems

jeroen_dekimo — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:59:41 GMT

Hey, thanks for the response.

I can confirm that without sQSPI init in mcuboot the slot boots correctly without applying any patches.
I guess this is a bug then that Nordic should patch in the future?

I'll write my own patch for nrf_cleanup.c for now, thanks for the assistance and clarification.

Cheers

Jeroen

RE: nRF54L15 + MCUboot + External flash with SQSPI: VPR problems

Simonr — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:54:53 GMT

Okay, thank you for explaining. Then it indeed sounds like it is the MCUBoot not cleaning up/uninitializing the sQSPI driver correctly. The easiest way to test whether this was the case would be to not init sQSPI in your MCUBoot image and see if the application is able to start up sQSPI then. Most of the miscellaneous cleanup from MCUBoot is added to the https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-mcuboot/blob/main/boot/zephyr/nrf_cleanup.c file, and it doesn't seem to be any mention of it there, so that could indeed be what we're looking at here.

Best regards,

Simon

RE: nRF54L15 + MCUboot + External flash with SQSPI: VPR problems

jeroen_dekimo — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:14:02 GMT

Hey Simon

Thanks for the reply.

Just to be clear: The SQSPI configuration does work whilst MCUboot is operating. It correctly initializes the sqspi driver, and i can read the data in the second external partition.

Things go wrong after MCUboot finishes and jumps to the main application.
The SQSPI init is stuck at the line mentioned in my initial post. My guess is because the coprocessor is kinda initialized twice: Once for MCUboot and a second time for the main application.

As also mentioned in my first post, we have a workaround, but are yet unsure if it is a bug of nordic, a bad deinitialization procedure of mcuboot or a wrong configuration of our part.

Kind regards

Jeroen

RE: nRF54L15 + MCUboot + External flash with SQSPI: VPR problems

Simonr — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 11:09:35 GMT

Hi Jeroen

Have you added the QSPI configuration(s) in the MCUBoot.conf file as well? If you're missing some configurations there that is a good initial guess to why it doesn't work when MCUBoot is set.

Best regards,

Simon