RE: NRF9160 Defining extra flash partition

fastfox — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 11:48:33 GMT

Thanks, I'll try these. I have my own fork from pretty much everything already anyway, so changing the pm.yml does not sound too bad.

RE: NRF9160 Defining extra flash partition

Didrik Rokhaug — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 11:22:31 GMT

Hi again, and soryy for this taking some time.

At the moment, there are two ways of defining an extra flash partition. Unfortunatly, both of them has some drawbacks:

1. You can edit the pm.yml file used by the NVS subsystem (<your NCS folder>/nrf/subsys/partition_manager/pm.yml.nvs). This will let the partition manager place the partition in a suitable location at compile time. The drawback here is that you have to edit a part of the SDK, which will make it (a bit) harder to reproduce on other computers, and it makes it (a bit) more complicated to update NCS version in the future.

2. You can create a static configuration for the partition manager, with the new partition hard coded in. This will keep all the configuration local to your project, thus avoiding the drawbacks of option 1. The drawback here is that you will have to create the static configuration yourself, which increases the time to "get started". Once you are done developing, or are starting to test DFU, you will need a static configuration anyway, as that is the only way to keep the partition map accross application versions. The difference here is that if the partition map is generated automatically, you can just use that (extract it from the build folder, and rename the file), versus having to construct it yourself. But, you can do something similar, where you use the partition manager to create a partition map with only one NVS partition, then edit it to add the second partition.

I will also add the ability for the application to define new partitions as a feture request, so that there will be a solution without any of the above drawbacks.

Edit: This PR will let you add extra partion manager configuration files to the build: https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrf/pull/2880

Best regards,

Didrik

RE: NRF9160 Defining extra flash partition

Didrik Rokhaug — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 15:32:30 GMT

Hi.

NCS uses the Partition Manager to partition the flash, and not the device tree.

That is why you are missing your 'storage-1' partition.

You can read more about the Partition Manager here: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/1.3.0/nrf/scripts/partition_manager/partition_manager.html

However, I am not sure what is the best way for the application to declare a second NVS partition. I will check with our developers tomorrow and get back to you.

Best regards,

Didrik