That may change. There are some very powerful MCUs appearing, with astonishing features, including hardware virtualization (hypervisors on an MCU,) multicore superscalar, heterogeneous CPU cores with high performance context switching, "AI" co-processors with high throughput buses, and other exotic features.
At some point, it might start making sense to level up the OS to (nommu) Linux on these devices. When the applications get complex enough, people find themselves wanting a full blown network stack, full featured storage/file systems that are aligned with non-embedded systems, regular shells, POSIX userland, etc.
All of the architectures I have in mind are 32 bit and "nommu"[1]: Cortex-R52/F, Infineon TriCore, Renesas RH850, NXP Power e200. Then you have RISC-V MCU Cambrian Explosion underway.
I qualify all this with mays and mights: it hasn't happened yet. I'm just careful not to discount the possibly of a <50 mAh RP Pico 3 booting uLinux, running python and serving web pages being a big hit.
[1] They all have various "partition" schemes to isolate banks of RAM for security, reliability, etc., but real MMUs are not offered.
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That may change. There are some very powerful MCUs appearing, with astonishing features, including hardware virtualization (hypervisors on an MCU,) multicore superscalar, heterogeneous CPU cores with high performance context switching, "AI" co-processors with high throughput buses, and other exotic features.
At some point, it might start making sense to level up the OS to (nommu) Linux on these devices. When the applications get complex enough, people find themselves wanting a full blown network stack, full featured storage/file systems that are aligned with non-embedded systems, regular shells, POSIX userland, etc.
All of the architectures I have in mind are 32 bit and "nommu"[1]: Cortex-R52/F, Infineon TriCore, Renesas RH850, NXP Power e200. Then you have RISC-V MCU Cambrian Explosion underway.
I qualify all this with mays and mights: it hasn't happened yet. I'm just careful not to discount the possibly of a <50 mAh RP Pico 3 booting uLinux, running python and serving web pages being a big hit.
[1] They all have various "partition" schemes to isolate banks of RAM for security, reliability, etc., but real MMUs are not offered.