I am looking forward to $20 laptops on aliexpress running this thing!

They are really cheap, get an esp32-c6 while you are at it.

https://www.espboards.dev/blog/esp32-soc-options/

How do you manage display sharing using it? Another device? I have a bunch of refurb servers, which I'd like to keep access to not waiting for an engineer to visit it. The budget is tight so proper KVM is not an option.

The memory model is flat enough. The problem with the memory is, you only have about 200kB traditional RAM. But then, you have 8MB of PSRAM. But it requires strict 4-byte alignment, and is noticeably slower.

What makes traditional OSs difficult on this platform, is the lack of memory protection. But I am a simple man, I am not writing an OS, all I wanted was a usable shell and an apps installer, so I made that work.

What makes general OS difficult on a SoC is usually the lack of hardware virtual<->real RAM address translation accelerator, the MMU.

I guess it's not that important if developers had no raw pointer access so that object can be anywhere dynamically assigned(Java!!! also JavaScript and all interpreted langs). But basically all desktop OS apps are written in C and they always want single consistent virtual addresses to jump around in and none of apps work without the hardware dynamic translation.

Can you expound on this problem a bit? I'm still pretty new to MCUs.

Right, people were asking about the shell used in the xcc700 demo, so that is released now too, and I tried to make it convenient to reuse as a component.

Esp32-s3 can do so much more, we are just scratching the surface. You might remember FabGL, that ran some nice demos in the realm of games and DOS emulation. Unfortunately, seems to be hard to update for modern versions of ESP-IDF. I am trying to build something more modular, with hope that some parts of it will survive longer.

I think someone also ran an old version of MacOS simulated on it, too, that is also an indication of the general capability.

Some parts of it, very likely. The shell is just linenoise with some glue code. How are things with ELF loading on rp2350, I did not check. May be possible, the question is, how much effort. In ESP-IDF that is a standard component now.

rp2350 supports freertos, so a similar port should be fairly trivial.

The io DMA code is a little special on the Pico. Very capable little chip. =3

BreezyBox is at an early development stage. What you see in the demo is mostly all there is so far. There is no telling if it will catch on, with more developers adding apps and features.

Some sort of web access for remote config should be possible, if anyone cares to implement that. The web server is already there; getting it to run some server side code may take extra effort.

It should be possible to get most of it compiled for C3, C6, or P4. But xcc700 is specific to the Xtensa CPU, so that would be a bigger effort. And the ELF binaries you install with eget would need to be recompiled (with existing gcc) and published for RISC-V. When it gets to that, we should make some minimal manifest support to eget and the release conventions, to distinguish between ELF files for different platforms. Also keep in mind how much PSRAM is available, if any.