Mbr without softdevice

[Martijn]

Is it possible to use the mbr, currently inside the softdevice, without the softdevice? Can we use the combination MBR/Application/bootloader? So we have a lot more flash space available. We do not need Bluetooth. If yes, how do we get this to work?

[Susheel Nuguru]

what do you need bootloader for if you do not need bluetooth? And no, it is not possible to separate MBR and softdevice, they come as one hex file.

EDIT 12.10.2015

Few things i learned today (did not knew we had serial version of bootlaoder). We do not provide separate hex file for MBR. Yes, it is possible to generate the MBR hexfile from softdevice hex as we know their address space.

Nordic employees have tried extracting MBR from the hex and to use it. It works. Only thing that does not work in the bootloader is the flash API (because the implementation of flash code resides inside softdevice). So you need to make your own flash library for the bootloader to work normally.

License issues. once you split the hex file, then you are on your own. It would mean that you have MBR hex file that we do not guarantee to be production quality. But you can still use it if you wish on your own risk.

[Clem Taylor]

Personally I think it would be very useful if Nordic released the source code for the MBR, specially for the nrf52.

One night I was bored/annoyed and I messed around with disassembling it, but my IDA Pro skillz where lacking (it is a scary cool tool, but it has quite a learning curve).