alt Hacker NewsRemoving nommu feels wrong to me. Being able to run linux on a simple enough hardware that anybody sufficiently motivated could write an emulator for, help us, as individuals, remain in control. The more complex things are, the less freedom we have.
It's not a well argumented thought, just a nagging feeling.
Maybe we need a simple posix os that would run on a simple open dedicated hardware that can be comprehended by a small group of human beings. A system that would allow communication, simple media processing and productivity.
These days it feels like we are at a tipping point for open computing. It feels like being a frog in hot water.
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Those operating systems already exist. You can run NetBSD on pretty much anything (it currently supports machines with a Motorola 68k CPU for example). Granted many of those machines still have an MMU iirc but everything is still simple enough to be comprehend by a single person with some knowledge in systems programming.
nommu is a neat concept, but basically nobody uses it, and I don't see that as likely to change. There's no real use case for using it in production environments. RTOSes are much better suited for use on nommu hardware, and parts that can run "real" Linux are getting cheaper all the time.
If you want a hardware architecture you can easily comprehend - and even build your own implementation of! - that's something which RISC-V handles much better than ARM ever did, nommu or otherwise.
There are some other open OSs, like Zephyr, NuttX and Contiki - so maybe they're the right thing to use for the nommu case rather than Linux?
This is a foreseeable cataclysm for me, as I retire next year, and the core of our queing system is 64-bit clean (k&r) as it compiled on Alpha, but our client software is very much not.
This is a young mans' game, and I am very much not.
If you want a POSIX OS, nommu Linux already isn't it: it doesn't have fork().
I don't think it makes sense to run Linux on most nommu hardware anymore. It'd make more sense to have a tiny unikernel for running a single application, because on nommu, you don't typically have any application isolation.
Removing nommu makes the kernel simpler and easier to understand.
ELKS can still run on systems without an mmu (though not microcontrollers afaik).
Nothing prevents you from maintaining nommu as a fork. The reality of things is, despite your feelings, people have to work on the kernel, daily, and there comes a point where your tinkering needs do not need to be supported in main. You can keep using old versions of the kernel, too.
Linux remains open source, extendable, and someone would most likely maintain these ripped out modules. Just not at the expense of the singular maintainer of the subsystem inside the kernel.
Supporting 32bit is not 'simple' and the difference between 32bit hardware and 64bit hardware is not big.
The industry has a lot of experience doing so.
In parallel, the old hardware is still supported, just not by the newest Linux Kernel. Which should be fine anyway because either you are not changing anything on that system anyway or you have your whole tool stack available to just patch it yourself.
But the benefit would be a easier and smaller linux kernel which would probably benefit a lot more people.
Also if our society is no longer able to produce chips in a commercial way and we loose all the experience people have, we are probably having a lot bigger issues as a whole society.
But I don't want to deny that it would be nice to have the simplest way of making a small microcontroller yourself (doesn't has to be fast or super easy just doable) would be very cool and could already solve a lot of issues if we would need to restart society from wikipedia.
We need accessible open hardware. Not shoehorning proprietary hardware to make it work with generic standards they never actually followed.
Open source is one thing, but open hardware - that’s what we really need. And not just a framework laptop or a system76 machine. I mean a standard 64-bit open source motherboard, peripherals, etc that aren’t locked down with binary blobs.