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- Hacker News
- Have a try.by boveyking
- When can we run doom on it?by piterrro
- On linux on an esp32? Doubtful that would even work.
There have been esp32 ports of doom for a decade though. Here's a current one: https://github.com/AmirhoseinMasoumi/ESP32-DOOM
- How can it run when there is no MMU? Isn't this like rewriting a large part of the kernel?by Rochus
- There is actually precedent for nommu Linux, though it obviously has tradeoffs.by yjftsjthsd-h
- 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...
by peterus - The responses to agent-aided dev seem a little over the top to me.
The derisive "vibe-coded" label is one thing, but the least compelling argument or complaint of them all is the truly worn out one about barriers to entry that you and I and so many others worked soooo hard to climb over are now being obliterated, allowing any casual Moe to stroll into your domain. How many professionals -- djs, photographers ... hell, SEO experts -- pretty much anyone technical and possibly creative have watched technology make work and the accumulation of competitors almost too easy.
If you just remember that no one in this time-space or anyother AFAICT is forcing you to consume or even read about projects like this, you'll find life goes on and you're actually still an expert who people who need experts will value materially (which should be your thing, otherwise wth are you complaining about?)
In fact, if you keep your mind open you might -- not definitely but _just_ _might_ -- find a piece of something useful amidst the slop. One fellow's trash ...
by fitsumbelay - > 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?
by yjftsjthsd-h - 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 anywayby Neywiny
- There are other ports that uses newer kernels (iirc annoyedmilk/esp32-s31-linux used 7.1). XIP saves me RAM, and on a device with 16mib ram I need to squeeze as much ram as possible. Besides I couldn't think of any use cases where you really need a newer kernelby grieferpig
- >Espressif's radio firmware blobs are closed source, and must run within ESP-IDF's FreeRTOS framework. It's near impossible to reverse-engineer them (not to mention legal risks.)
It's not nearly impossible, it has already been done :)
Slides: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/media/...
by biosboiii - It is for the older original esp32, not for this port which is esp32-s31. Their radio are drastically different. Also their reverse engineered firmware are incomplete so esp-hosted remains the best choice for now.by grieferpig
- Looks interesting but wouldn't something like netBSD be a better fit?by kogasa240p
- 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
by Joel_Mckay - Everything is untested or WIP. What is the news here, sorry?by Izmaki
- The news is: vibe coder vibe coded this and got their agents to upvote it.by jubilanti
- 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.
by Aurornis - On the other hand this shows that it is possible and gives a floor for performance.by IgorPartola
- 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.
by voakbasda - Author here, few things to clarify:
- Yes it is vibe coded. It do work on real S31 dev boards (there's console output and binary releases to prove that.) I understand the esp32 microcontroller architecture to some extent, but I barely know how to port Linux to other RISC-V platforms; what I did is to tell the agent something like "Go implement an IPC transport that uses a shared SRAM buffer and an IPC interrupt doorbell" or "sdmmc uses designware ip; search esp-idf usage and port the existing Linux driver over." An AI agent on its own would never discover S31's bespoke hardware behavior without my guidance, for example, that the register `mcliccfg` has writable bits, despite esp-idf saying otherwise. However I admit that AI assistance is the direct reason why I am able to progress this fast, and I did learn a lot about kernel development during the process. If you're bothered by AI code, move on.
- Untested is a bit misleading: per the README, means "seems working; not thoroughly tested." They do seem to work at the time when their drivers are being built. Three weeks into this project I can't have everything stress-tested already.
- I built this more as a proof of concept intending for my own use; I did not expect it to gain popularity anytime soon, so the docs are very bad for now.
by grieferpig - 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 )
by tyingq - 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.by ofalkaed
- There isn't much interesting about a rocket engine other than it's rocket science and it's awesome if it works. A basic mockup of one is in PrusaSlicer sample files.by numpad0
- > 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.
by Aurornis