How to increase bootloader size in SDK 15.3?

[Jefferson]

I tried to increase the bootloader size by reducing IROM start address and increasing size but I always get the same error:

.\_build\nrf52832_xxaa_s132.axf: Error: L6407E: Sections of aggregate size 0x131c bytes could not fit into .ANY selector(s).

I set start to 0x5E000 and size to 0x20000.  Is this the correct way to increase size?  I want to combine BLE and UART into a single bootloader because sometimes I want to use one or the other but not both at the same time.  Does anyone know If this design is possible?  I can't get past compilation to test because of this size problem.

[Jefferson]

I found out the error is because of RAM size.  Is there a reason why the BLE bootloader reserves so much RAM for the softdevice?  The IRAM1 start is 0x200057B8 but the nrf_sdh_ble warning says to set it to 0x20002A98.  I tried it at 0x20002A98 and it seems to work still.

[Vidar Berg]

It's safe to use the RAM base suggested by the nrf_sdh_ble warning. I think the reason we use such a high RAM base is to allow the same linker settings to be used for all softdevice variants, but 0x200057B8 as RAM start seems a bit excessive. Assume you disabled code optimization or made code changes since you got the error?

[Jefferson]

I am making a bootloader that supports both BLE and UART so I added all the UART code to the BLE project which causes the size problem.  I increased the RAM size and the linker error goes away.  BLE mode works but UART gives this error which I am trying to debug:

pc_ble_driver_py.exceptions.NordicSemiException: Extended Error 0x0C: The hash of the received firmware image does not match the hash in the init packet.

[Vidar Berg]

The error indicates that the received image is incomplete or corrupted. I would suggest to take a memory dump of the image in bank 1 after DFU over BLE and UART and compare them to see what the difference is.

nrfjprog --memrd <bank 1 start address > --n <size of image in bytes> > <output>.txt  

[Jefferson]

Thank you.  The problem was SD flash API was being used and I need to use NVMC API in UART mode.