No boot with CONFIG_NVS or LITTLEFS enabled

[napei_]

Hi,

I am trying to implement external flash storage onto my custom board, featuring an nrf9160-SICA-B1 and a Winbound w25q128jv 128Mbit flash chip on SPI3 (I cannot get QSPI to work in devicetree).

I am able to successfully read the entire flash chip through a small test script using the base flash_read APIs, however as soon as I enable either CONFIG_NVS or CONFIG_FILE_SYSTEM_LITTLEFS the board no longer boots, and debugging has only gotten me so far with an exception handler break somewhere inside TFM. I am unsure on how to debug this further, or what the root cause is. It's not clear what exactly breaks, as I don't even need to implement anything in my storage module (remove from cmake) and the board will still refuse to boot (or at least output to UART) so I assume something is wrong inside the TFM side of things.

Stepping through with the debugger it never gets past FIH_CALL(tfm_core_init, fih_rc);

It also appears that the partitions are not being placed into the external flash as I would expect, just looking at the partition yaml file. I tried static partition config but that also didn't help, and I am unsure on how to proceed for that as the documentation is unclear.

My end goal, is to have 16MB (128MBit) of flash memory available to either littlefs or NVS for storing persistent data offline while waiting for LTE to sync.

SPI3 Definition:

&spi3 {
  label = "SPI3";
  compatible = "nordic,nrf-spim";
  status = "okay";
  cs-gpios = <&gpio0 7 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>;
  pinctrl-0 = <&spi3_default>;
  pinctrl-1 = <&spi3_sleep>;
  pinctrl-names = "default", "sleep";
  w25q128jv: w25q128jv@0 {
    compatible = "jedec,spi-nor";
    label = "W25Q128JV_SPI";
    reg = <0x0>;
    spi-max-frequency = <80000000>;
    wp-gpios = <&gpio0 8 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>;
    hold-gpios = <&gpio0 10 GPIO_ACTIVE_LOW>;
    size = <DT_SIZE_M(16)>;
    // has-dpd;
    // t-enter-dpd = <4000>;
    // t-exit-dpd = <25000>;
    jedec-id = [ ef 40 18  ];
  };
};

/{
  chosen {
    nordic,pm-ext-flash = &w25q128jv;
  };

};

Partition Definition:

/delete-node/ &storage_partition;

&w25q128jv {
  partitions {
    compatible = "fixed-partitions";
    #address-cells = <1>;
    #size-cells = <1>;
    partition@0 {
      label = "storage";
      reg = <0x0 DT_SIZE_M(16)>;
    };
  };
};

My prj.conf

#### Flash Storage ####
CONFIG_SPI=y
CONFIG_SPI_NOR=y
CONFIG_SPI_NOR_FLASH_LAYOUT_PAGE_SIZE=4096
CONFIG_NORDIC_QSPI_NOR=n

CONFIG_FLASH=y
CONFIG_FLASH_MAP=y
CONFIG_FLASH_PAGE_LAYOUT=y
CONFIG_FILE_SYSTEM=y
CONFIG_FS_LOG_LEVEL_DBG=y

# Uncommenting either of these causes the board to not run
# CONFIG_FILE_SYSTEM_LITTLEFS=y
# CONFIG_NVS=y

Happy to provide more debugging information as necessary, just not sure what to include. I may be missing something.

[Simon]

I was able to configure the NVS sample to use onboard external flash on the nRF9160 DK. I programmed using the 0.14.0 version of the board,

which will apply this dts node:

https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-zephyr/blob/98bc3a7a6b3917ce5a058e7a7271d3036edffb88/boards/arm/nrf9160dk_nrf9160/nrf9160dk_nrf9160_common_0_14_0.dtsi#L40-L60

Can you test the following sample? Test it with the nRF9160 DK first (remember to program the nrf9160dk_nrf52840 with this sample first).

0143.nvs_ext_flash_9160.zip

If you succeed with that, modify it to your specific flash device.

The proper way to do it, would be to add a pm_static.yml file with something like this:

nvs_storage:
  address: 0x00000
  device: MX25R64
  region: external_flash
  size: 0x40000
external_flash:
  address: 0x0
  end_address: 0x800000
  region: external_flash
  size: 0x800000

Then fetch the device and offset from the storage partition in main.c, 

#define STORAGE_NODE_LABEL storage //this should resolve to the nvs_storage partition defined in the pm_static.yml file


//This should get the "MX25R64" device from the pm_static.yml file
FLASH_AREA_DEVICE(STORAGE_NODE_LABEL);
if (!device_is_ready(fs.flash_device)) {
	printk("Flash device %s is not ready\n", fs.flash_device->name);
	return;
}

//This should get the offset (address) from the pm_static.yml file
fs.offset = 0x0;//FLASH_AREA_OFFSET(storage);

However, I was not able to get it to work doing it this way, so I just set the device and offset directly.

Let me know if are able to get the sample to run, and if you're able to modify it according to your external flash. Also let me know if you would like me to look more into the pm_static.yml-approach.

Best regards,

Simon