Last successful boot on the S8815 dongle on 2025-09-11 using kernel v6.17-rc1 with two minor patches, lasy successful boot on the NHK15 on 2025-09-14 using kernel v6.17-rc1 with the same two patches.
The Nomadik SoC was created by ST Microelectronics in the early 2000s for mobile phone development. For details see the Wikipedia article.
Resources:
I just use whatever is available out there, the latest gnueabihf toolchain works and so does LLVM CLANG.
CS_BASE=/var/linus/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.8-2013.08_linux/
export PATH=$PATH:${CS_BASE}/bin
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:${CS_BASE}/share/doc/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf/man/
The nomadik.mak makefile is what I use to compile kernels for Nomadik
Using these also optionally use a minimal initramfs root filesystem placed in your home directory. (This is to get you to a prompt without a root filesystem installed in the flash.) This root filesystem is created using this script. A prebuilt version can be obtained here:
Copy the rootfs to you home directory and the nomdik.mak file to your linux/ git tree or base dir and simply:
> make -f nomadik.mak config > make -f nomadik.mak build
The Nomadik uses U-Boot which has an interactive boot loader prompt. Usually you want to boot the uImage from TFTP by first setting up a TFTP server and then issue something like this (with proper constants changed):
setenv serverip 169.254.1.1;setenv ipaddr 169.254.1.2;setenv bootfile uImage;tftpboot;bootm
I compile a root filesystem for Kirkwood which is the same ARMv5t as Nomadik. This was working fine for me in september of 2025 with the trunk OpenWrt.
Nowadays I just tar xvfz this onto an SDcard and use a uImage that will attempt to mount root on the SDcard.
You can enable the network on any of the platforms from this rootfs
with something like:
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.12 netmask 255.255.255.0 up