Uros Popovic
popovicu.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2023
Uros Popovic writes hands-on posts on low-level systems: RISC-V, no-MMU Linux, custom kernels, bare metal Rust and USB devices.
What HN saysHN links it for the no-MMU Linux on RISC-V post and the micro Linux distro walkthrough. One commenter wonders why the work runs only in QEMU.
19HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
andai · 2025-12-26
See also this post by the author:
Making a micro Linux distro [for RISC-V]
https://popovicu.com/posts/making-a-micro-linux-distro/
kbolino · 2025-09-02
Thanks! I was able to find some additional info on no-MMU Linux [1], [2], [3]. It seems position-independent executables are the norm on regular (MMU) Linux now anyway (and probably have been for a long time). I took a look under the covers of uClibc and it seems like malloc just delegates most of its work to mmap, at least for the malloc-simple implementation [4]. That implies to me that different processes' heaps can be interleaved (without overlapping), but the kernel manages the allocations.
[1]: https://maskray.me/blog/2024-02-20-mmu-less-systems-and-fdpic
[2]: https://popovicu.com/posts/789-kb-linux-without-mmu-riscv/
[3]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt
[4]: https://github.com/kraj/uClibc/blob/ca1c74d67dd115d059a875150e10b8560a…
ngcc_hk · 2023-10-10
Quite interesting. But given it run in qemu I wonder why not develop his https://popovicu.com/posts/making-a-micro-linux-distro/into a more general one and then hightlight this variation in a short article on the difference.