Stuck at building blinky example: ".text is larger than specified size"

[olalonde]

I recently bought a NRF52840 DK board to teach myself embedded development. I am now following the nRF5 SDK tutorial here:

https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp?topic=%2Fug_gsg_ses%2FUG%2Fgsg%2Fcompile_ses.html&cp=1_0_1_6_2

After opening the blinky project in SES (~/code/nordic/sdk/nRF5_SDK_17.1.0_ddde560/examples/peripheral/blinky/pca10056/blank/ses$), I click "Build > Build blinky_pca10056" and get the following error in the Output tab: ".text is larger than specified size".

I am a bit surprised by this error since I followed all the previous correctly I believe and didn't edit the code at all.

Can anyone explain what this error means and how to fix it?

Thanks.

[olalonde]

I seem to have fixed this issue by right clicking in the left tab Project 'blinky_pca10056' and selecting "Import Section Placement". The file "flash_placement.xml" then appeared under "System Files" in the file tree. I then removed the `size="0x4"`  strings from the file, saved and built the project (no more errors).

[Edvin]

Hello,

It built without errors in my unmodified SDK. I am not sure exactly how these flash_placement.xml files are used before you click import or edit, like you did there. Whether it uses some default settings from the last project you opened, or if it is set somewhere in the SDK. Anyway, when I clicked "edit section placement", my file looks like your screenshot, without the extra " ' ", so it looks good now.

Best regards,

Edvin

[Justin Reina]

Thank you for this fix, this works!

[Adam Varga]

The problem is that olalonde is using a newer version of SES (v7) which is unable to compile certain projects because of the mentioned issue ( ".text is larger than specified size"). I faced this problem in relation to the secure bootloader examples from SDK17.1.0 with SES v7 as well.

His solution of removing the size="0x4" attribute in the .xml worked for me too, but I found it concerning to remove such an attribute until I found out that this attribute was not present in the same flash_placement.xml file in SDK16.0.0.

It would be nice to get an official confirmation that it's safe to remove that attribute.

EDIT: more info about why that attribute is there:

devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../bug-in-flash_placement-xml-example-file

[Edvin]

The official statement from Nordic is that SES is tested with the version mentioned in the release notes, and since the nRF5 SDK is in maintenance mode, it will not be updated for future releases of SES. I am sorry for this inconvenience. I must admit that I have not looked into any of the workarounds to make it run in the later SES versions, but I believe there are quite a few posts on it here on DevZone, and they should work just fine. 

BR,

Edvin