nRF Command Line Tools for ARM aarch64?

[Roger Leigh]

Hi folks,

Looking at the nRF Command Line Tools download page, I can see versions of the nRF Command Line Tools for Linux, MacOS and Windows.  The Linux versions come as variants for 32- and 64-bit Intel.  Is there a build for ARM aarch64?  If not, is that something you might consider providing in the future?  ARM now provide their GNU ARM Embedded toolchain for these three platforms, and it would be very useful it it was possible to directly build and flash on aarch64.

If you don't provide binaries, is it possible to build the command line tools from source?

Thanks, Roger

[felix.ng]

Anne van Rossum 's example seems to run on Ubuntu. In my case of using aarch64 Raspberry OS, I didn't add any sources and only needed to add armhf to the list of "foreign" architectures as follows:

dpkg --add-architecture armhf
apt update

For more information, refer to https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWTO.

Then, go to https://www.segger.com/downloads/jlink/ and https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Development-tools/nrf-command-line-tools/download to download the 32-bit software and install them (change the package name if you use another version):

dpkg -i JLink_Linux_V762_arm.deb
apt --fix-broken install
dpkg -i JLink_Linux_V762_arm.deb

dpkg -i nrf-command-line-tools_10.15.2_armhf.deb
apt --fix-broken install
dpkg -i nrf-command-line-tools_10.15.2_armhf.deb

Note that we need to run "dpkg -i" twice for each package. The first time is to let apt know which dependencies are to install.

And voilà:

nrfjprog --version
nrfjprog version: 10.15.2 external
JLinkARM.dll version: 7.62

There still may be some benefit to having an aarch64 build of nRF Command Line Tools, so this post does not dismiss the needs of other developers. I just want to share a workaround when we are waiting for the hopefully still coming aarch64 build.