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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

That thing clocks a 400MHz out of the box and has coprocessors .. I'd also guess that risc-v isa is more performant than esp32's one (super wild guess). Let's say it sits in the middle :)

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The distinction to me is software; if it runs Linux or such, it's a computer. If I have to provide "firmware" then it is a microcontroller.

There are Fedora and FreeBSD builds for RISC-V. This particular item seems to have only 8MB though, so not really in (most people's) "computer" realm. ;)

RISC-V has a base ISA and many extensions, several of which are virtually required to run a "real" OS with features such as virtual memory. Every build of Linux I've seen for RISC-V is for an RVGC processor with an additional privileged mode.

Theoretically it should be possible to run "Linux" on a glorified microcontroller like the OP with μClinux, but I haven't seen that used for "real" work. It certainly couldn't be used as a general purpose OS.

Oh man I was so happy when I migrated from a PC 386SX with 2MB to a Pentium 75 with 8MB!

A joke about a memory-hungry program use to be that EMACS stands for Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.

ELeven Exabytes and Constant TRashing Of Nodes

I went similarly from a 286 with 1MB to a Pentium 166 with 16MB.

That distinction is getting blurrier and blurrier every day with the ability to flash firmware to some MCUs such that they run Linux. :)

In my opinion the line to draw is support for a privileged mode/protection rings/memory protection. Anything without that can run μClinux at best, which isn't much better than an RTOS. Without process isolation an operating system isn't very "general purpose."

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