What is this thing a MCU or a CPU? 64-bit?!?! It has a MMU? 700K of SRAM is alot for a MCU but so little for a CPU no?
The $8 Linux Computer
111–120 of 166 posts
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#112What is this thing a MCU or a CPU? 64-bit?!?! It has a MMU? 700K of SRAM is alot for a MCU but so little for a CPU no?
It is a SoC with MMU. It just looks like a MCU.
64MByte RAM, (45MByte of it free after logging in.)
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interesting thing about this is that it's a RISC-V machine, at least for me. A few years ago RISC-V dev boards were much more expensive than their ARM counterparts, nowadays they still are but are getting closer in price parity.
I just bought one of these esp32 boards with risc-v chip off adafruit a couple days ago: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5337 I think they are positioned to be the new low-cost esp32 variant.
Yes, but those are microcontrollers. This is a computer on a chip with mmu, and three cores, 64MB ram.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#114Wasn't Pi Zero around $5 on release?
And didn't require a PhD in UART to get an OS running on it. Seriously, who the hell thought the process described in that blog makes any kind of practical sense at all. I mean the thing has two USB ports, TWO! And you can't use either, hahaha!
OP here...it got a little better with a patched picoprobe.
I wrote up part 2 here: http://thelittleengineerthatcould.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-8...
But yeah, not plug-n-play. I still have to find out how to get network or SD-Card.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#115While this is "technically" a "Linux computer", in practice with such a small amount RAM the name is a stretch.
OP here...
My first linux computer was a 33Mhz i386. I can't remember the amount of RAM, but it must have been 2MB or maybe 4MB.
This thing has 64MByte of RAM, after login, 44MB of it is free.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#116We could have pretty decent $8 Linux machines, with USB, screen, touch, audio, MBs or even GBs RAM, if there would be some standard way to sideload fresh GNU/Linux onto billions of retired Android devices.
linux made by corporations exactly to prevent it.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#117haven't seen a blogger blog in a while
Heh... I do feel like a dinosaur at times.
Do you have a suggestion for a better platform?
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet Windows ran 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit code on the same core for years. Huh. Really folks. It doesn't take new research or exotic OS design ideas, to do something that has been common practice for a decade. Let's quit pretending linux is driving any innovation. It's followed behind in OS design, often by years.
Linux is, too. The thing being discussed here is supporting multiple pieces of _hardware_ in the same machine that have different instruction sets. I don't think Windows supports that either.
they do, using drivers, that is too novel idea for linux.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#119> You cannot program it using USB, like you would an Arduino, ESP32, Stamp-C3 or rPi Pico. Nope... this needs to be programmed via the UART TX/RX pins.
I think it should be possible to use another ESP32 or ESP8266 for programming.
Re: The $8 Linux Computer
#120Cool. Soon enough, it will be the even smaller $1 Linux computer. And then, the even smaller $0.10 Linux computer. In the future, even toilet paper will be running Linux.
> That's a nice watch you got there, want me to turn it into a webserver?