Sylphide OS: a general-purpose OS for microcontroller-based computers(projects.freehackers.org)
32 pointsby iamnothere3 hours ago3 comments
  • NooneAtAll5an hour ago
    > On top of that, Sylphide OS adds:

    > drivers for mouse, keyboard, display, storage and network

    and couple lines later

    > What you don't have yet, but definitely planned:

    > storage (microsd, usb) > network (ethernet, wifi)

    I'm not gonna be angry at false advertising, but OS attempts only become appropriate to discuss once you made drivers and actually ran stuff on physical hardware

    Before that point it's just one of the many dozens and dozens other half-efforted attempts at OS that have been done over and over to death by now

    • iamnothere33 minutes ago
      Well, given that it’s built on FreeRTOS, this stuff should be fairly cheap to implement. I think you’re being a little overly critical for an early stage project that fills an interesting niche (GUI OS for MCUs).
  • Rochus21 minutes ago
    > Olimex esp32-p4-pc, the flagship product: new, powerful

    That's a very cool board, but pretty tricky. Great idea to run an old Mac OS on it. I try on and off to port the Oberon System 3 to this board since I received it in February. The display already works pretty good, but still a lot of road blocks.

    • iamnothere16 minutes ago
      Oberon would be a great fit for this board, your efforts are appreciated.

      It’s amazing how these inexpensive “MCUs” (not even sure you can call them that) are overtaking old PCs now.

  • irdc3 hours ago
    If it's running on MMU-less systems, I'd be interested in how it loads multiple programs into memory: does it need to relocate each program binary? If so, doesn't that preclude using execute-in-place (XIP)?
    • Arelius2 hours ago
      Generally, running in a MMU without static task config would require relocatable binaries. I'm not sure why it'd preclude execute-in-place. As a relocatable binary should be executable from generally any address space. However I suspect that hardware without an MMU is not super likely to be able to support XIP.

      It is based on FreeRTOS, so it should be fairly well documented.

      • dvdkonan hour ago
        > I suspect that hardware without an MMU is not super likely to be able to support XIP.

        This seems strange to me. Don't most microcontrollers support executing directly from flash? Some even can't execute from RAM.

        Though I agree with the main point, you can compile code as "PIC" - position independent code, and not bother with (ELF) relocations except for linking.