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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

> After seeing this I think the Amazon AWS/FreeRTOS combo is looking like the better architecture for a node solution. FreeRTOS can run on lowly M3s at 120Mhz, like the LPC2478

Is that supposed to imply linux can't? Or that linux plus a GNU subsystem can't? I've personally run it on a lot lower end hardware than that seems to be.

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The Cortex M series is prolific but lacks a proper memory management unit which makes running Linux an iffy business. FreeRTOS is by far the most dominant player in this space.

Different markets really, sounds like Microsoft is targeting items like internet connected cameras (think Mirai endpoints). Where as Amazon is targeting low power prolific devices, eg. IoT buttons.

Oh, it can. I've run ucLinux (MMU-less Linux) on an LPC1788 (Cortex-M3) and it works...okay. Making dynamic libraries work correctly on it is a pain in the ass. It just wasn't worth it at the end and the O/S hogged up most of the processor, RAM, and Flash.

Exactly. I think these end up as good PoCs - and it would be amazing to think of a future where we can run one of the Linux derivatives on a something that was designed with FreeRTOS or equivalent in mind - but it's just not going to happen on a commercial scale in my opinion.

ARM Linux isn't really slimming down, so the chips need to grow to catch up.

You're starting to see devices like the Renesas RZ/A1H that has 10MiB of SDRAM on the die and can boot Linux out of a single cheap QSPI memory part.

> Is that supposed to imply linux can't?

Regular Linux can't. uCLinux might.

Since late 2.5.x, uCLinux has been more or less mainlined.

You can run regular Linux on these, you just probably don't want to.

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