It does seem like it at a first glance - these are Cortex-M microcontrollers which are really not suitable for running a full-fledged OS. They don't even have an MMU, and they usually only have ~10-100KB of RAM on the chip. Plus, only some packages with >144 pins are able to memory-map external RAM chips like these evaluation boards do.

It's a very cool and impressive project, but I wouldn't use it to write an application. Besides cost, the biggest reasons to use these instead of Cortex-A chips are power efficiency and simplicity, and implementing things like process isolation in software seems like throwing all that out the window.

But on the other hand, if your device will be plugged in and power consumption isn't a huge concern, I could definitely see the appeal to having things like a Ruby interpreter or an X server running on your MCU. You could compile and deploy existing code, ideally. But I bet it would take more time to get all of that working well than it would to just write your application with an SDK and an RTOS.

Also, I'm guessing this project predates the STM32MP1: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...