Running Linux with Kernel 6.3 on Open Source Hardware Board with ESP32-S3

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21 points·jandeboevrie··5 comments

This will be a really big deal if they refine it a bit. Right now there doesn't seem to be any good way to add user-loadable "Apps" to an IoT device, and that's a really big problem with IoT.

Apps would free people from a specific cloud provider without requiring a separate server box which in itself is an expensive thing that can become obsolete. With apps, your cloud provider becomes swappable, and devices can connect directly, or you can choose to connect to a self-hosted controller.

I dunno if the audiences for these 2 things overlap, but since the posting of Willow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35948462 https://github.com/toverainc/willow#readme) I've become aware of references to that ESP32-S3 package

How it is even possible to run Linux only with 8MB of RAM? In the article it's Ubuntu, it's the distro what I use on my Dell i7 gen. 3 laptop.

The wording is confusing. They used an Ubuntu build system to run this script, which produces the firmware file to be flashed to the ESP32. The firmware is a minimal Linux-based OS, not Ubuntu.

https://gist.github.com/jcmvbkbc/316e6da728021c8ff670a24e674...

It just runs the kernel and one CLI app, maybe two. No ui, no swap.

It is the same kind of rootfs your laptop runs, but the similarities end there.

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