Is it possible to use vanilla zephyr instead of NCS

mjm987

Because I’m working mostly with other zephyr hardware platforms, I would prefer to use vanilla zephyr without NCS for the nRF9160 and/or nrf9151 feather.
Building of my existing nRF9160 feather projects is possible without errors when using newer zephyr releases but instead of ‘app_update.bin’ only ‘zephyr.bin’ is generated which might be downloaded but does not work.

Is it somehow possible to generate ‘app_update.bin’ outside of ncs or if not using zephyrs version of mcuboot and use mcumgr-cli to serial download?

jaredwolff

NCS is always required especially if you want to use the modem API etc. I believe you can compile as a microcontroller but then you miss all the benefits/functionality Nordic provides.

mjm987

Yes thats true, unfortunately I tested with samples which did not need the modem API. When compiling projects which needs the modem API there are lots of undefined symbols.
Thx

AchimKraus

Nordic Forum: nRF91 with Vanilla Zephyr

The nRF91 comes with a nrfxlib, which may be used also with other RTOS (but without support from Nordic for other RTOS). The NCS then provides the zephyr mapping nrf_modem_lib for that nrfxlib and also some c-wrapper functions around some (specific) AT-cmds.
I’m not sure, what benefit you expect from moving the very Nordic specific stuff into main zephyr. Anyway, if you just want to have less dependencies, go for that trick in nfed.