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

[Karl Ylvisaker]

Hello,

That does seem a tad excessive.. I will attempt to replicate this on a mint Ubuntu, and get back to you with the results.

Best regards,
Karl

[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