Linux on ESP32 (github.com)
84 points by boveyking 4 days ago
tyingq 5 hours ago
The responses all seem a little harsh. If you poke through the user's history, this kind of thing isn't new for them, going back to pre-LLM-could-do-this days.
I think the docs are light because the primary goal for them is not to provide everyone with a well documented linux on esp-32-s31 guide, but rather this that they shared:
"I'm currently working on a hackable music player and I used to prototype with the OG esp32, and tbh if I wasn't for Bluetooth audio I'd move on to S3 already" ( from the links in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49134987 )
Aurornis 2 hours ago
> If you poke through the user's history, this kind of thing isn't new for them, going back to pre-LLM-could-do-this days.
Is there another set of comments or history I should be looking at? The only pre-LLM comment is about doing a prototype for something with the old ESP32. That was a common hobby microcontroller introductory project, but there’s a world of difference between playing with an OG ESP32 and porting MMU Linux to a new platform.
I think we should be honest about what this is: Someone spent their tokens letting an agent attempt bring up of Linux on the platform and it got something to work. I’m appreciative that it was shared. However, given the lack of useful documentation (the key MMU doc is basically empty) and the lack of other explanations, I don’t think we should be reading more into this than as a pure LLM agent proof of concept.
ofalkaed 3 hours ago
It takes no effort to play LLM or not, you don't need to know anything about the topic or put anytime into reading and understanding the submission, just find that em-dash and you can turn every discussion into meta slop.
tyingq 2 hours ago
I also think an LLM isn't going to just spit this all out and viola, it boots. I imagine there were many rounds of jtag debug, copy/paste into the LLM prompt, with enough human knowledge/context to say the right thing, suggest some existing implementation snippet, etc.
Aurornis 2 hours ago
Izmaki 8 hours ago
Everything is untested or WIP. What is the news here, sorry?
jubilanti 7 hours ago
The news is: vibe coder vibe coded this and got their agents to upvote it.
genericacct 2 hours ago
For a worthy goal .. linux on esp would be a game changer for iot imho
NooneAtAll3 6 hours ago
his*
jagged-chisel 6 hours ago
Aurornis 6 hours ago
Obviously vibecoded but interesting nevertheless. The agent left everything marked as untested in the README but the output snippets toward the bottom imply that it got something working enough to log in and run some commands.
Nobody is going to mistake this for a carefully crafted port of Linux but it at least serves as a proof of concept.
The real downside of the vibecoding is that we don’t get any helpful information about what it took to get it done with thoughtful analysis from a human. Just a chunk of code in a GitHub repo with some half-coherent README. There’s a docs folder, but the documentation about the MMU part just says that there are two MMUs across a couple lines of notes. Okay, great.
voakbasda 4 hours ago
Given the context of a vibe-coded project, would it be reasonable to assume the example outputs are outright hallucinations, without seeing indisputable evidence to the contrary?
Sad that’s where my mind goes, but this is what the world has been training me to believe. And these doubts now eclipse the skepticism that I developed toward things that humans posted on the internet.
Lies, damn lies, and LLMs.
Aurornis 2 hours ago
I don’t think so. I think this is a real result confirmed by a real person.
I also think it’s pretty cool.
We do need to keep it in context though.
IgorPartola 5 hours ago
On the other hand this shows that it is possible and gives a floor for performance.
yjftsjthsd-h 8 hours ago
> In mainline linux, XIP support on RISC-V was removed, so 6.12 was used instead which has proper XIP support.
Doesn't that put it in an awkward position relying on a dead end feature?
Neywiny 7 hours ago
What I remember was they said it could come back if people needed it but it was broken for looking (months, years) at a time. So even if they didn't remove it, 6.12 might be the last working version with it anyway
iririririr 2 hours ago
it's common to move "unused" code to patches
kogasa240p 7 hours ago
Looks interesting but wouldn't something like netBSD be a better fit?
Joel_Mckay 2 hours ago
Most ESP chips use FreeRTOS, and flash page caching support in hardware.
Unlike Multi-core Application processors which are a better fit for OS like BSD or Linux. =3
Rochus 4 days ago
How can it run when there is no MMU? Isn't this like rewriting a large part of the kernel?
peterus 8 hours ago
This is for the recently released ESP32-S31 which does have a MMU, unlike the ESP32-S3.
The author has more details in this reddit post: https://eddrit.com/r/esp32/comments/1vait52/mmu_linux_on_the... And the docs section of the repo: https://github.com/GrieferPig/esp32-s31-linux/tree/main/docs...
Rochus 7 hours ago
Thanks for the links. This doesn't seem to be a true RISC-V MMU (according to the Sv32 specification) integrated into the CPU core itself, but just a peripheral designed for memory mapped SPI flash and PSRAM. So as far as I understand there is no true process isolation with page faults and dynamic paging.
Rohansi 5 hours ago
chrsw 7 hours ago
The Microchip PIC32MZ MCU has an MMU as well. But not with wireless options in a 8x8 QFN80 package like this ESP32-S31. That's pretty small. No flash though.
yjftsjthsd-h 8 hours ago
There is actually precedent for nommu Linux, though it obviously has tradeoffs.
stevefan1999 4 hours ago
Yeah, nommu Linux basically cannot run normal ELF since there is no virtual memory which is needed for relative addressing and relocations. You are mostly left with classical formats like AT&T a.out only
derefr 3 hours ago
piterrro 5 hours ago
When can we run doom on it?
boveyking 4 days ago
Have a try.