nrfutil - Very high memory consumption

[Ankit Bhatnagar]

Hi,

I am using nrfutil to generate a bootloader ota package for NRF52832 soic. The command I am using is

nrfutil pkg generate --hw-version 52 --sd-req 0xA8 --bootloader-version 2 --bootloader bootloader.hex --key-file ./dfu_key_private.pem ota_package_bootloader.zip

I measure on my ubuntu pc, when this command is running, the RAM consumption jumps from 3Gb to 15Gb ! So this command while executing is consuming over 12gb ! Can anyone explain why it would consume so much RAM? To test, I ran same on a virtual machine with 4gb RAM. As expected, nrfutil process gets killed by the system with "Out of memory" as the reason.

The version of nrfutil I am using is 5.2.0 

Would appreciate if someone can explain this and how to reduce the RAM consumption.

Attached is a screen shot using nrfutil memory consumption in ubuntu

[Ankit Bhatnagar]

Thanks. this is only happening when I am using it to build the secure bootloader ota package. When using it for application ota package, it works fine with no memory consumption spikes

[Karl Ylvisaker]

That is very interesting, thank you for the update!
I have been having some hardware trouble on my end, but I will attempt again to replicate this as soon as I get the chance to.

I will let you know as soon as that happens, and I am terribly sorry for my long delay between communication.
If I am able to replicate this, I will elevate the issue to the the nrfutil developers.

Best regards,
Karl

[Ankit Bhatnagar]

Thanks Karl. Appreciate it. Looking forward to your test results

[Karl Ylvisaker]

Hello again,

Sorry for my late reply - I finally got my hardware problem sorted.

I attempted to replicate the behavior with the setup you describe, but I was unsuccessful in achieving the high memory consumption. I will confer with some colleagues on the nrfutil team to see if any of them have heard of or encountered similar issues previously.
I will update you on what they say.

Best regards,
Karl

[Karl Ylvisaker]

Hello again,

I spoke to the team and they were very intrigued by this - none of them had heard of this behavior previously. 
Could you tell me some more about your test:

- Which Ubuntu version are you using?

- How did you become aware of the RAM surge? Did you experience any other unexpected behavior, such as the process terminating with an error or did it go on for a very long time?

- How long did the RAM spike last for?

- Are you using the secure bootloader from the SDK examples, or have you made your own/any modifications to it?

With this information, I hope to be able to replicate the issue here on my end.

I am looking forward to getting to the bottom of this, thank you for bringing it to our attention.

Best regards,
Karl

[Karl Ylvisaker]

Hello again,

After further testing I am still unable to see the behavior you describe - but I am very interested in getting to the bottom of this issue.
Could you possible send me the VM that you were able to replicate this behavior on? It would be of great help.
That way, I would undoubtedly be able to replicate the issue, and I may then ask our nrfjprog engineers to take a look at the behavior.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Best regards,
Karl