Vlad Tomoiagă, an electrical engineering student from Romania, successfully ported Linux to the CH32V003 microcontroller chip. This RISC-V architecture chip stands out for its incredibly low price of around 4 Baht per chip, making it a highly cost-effective option. However, despite the successful Linux port, the CH32V003 chip only has 2KB of RAM, insufficient for booting Linux. An external PSRAM chip with 8MB of RAM through the SPI port is necessary to provide an adequate memory. Moreover, it requires the simulation of a memory management unit (MMU) using the mini-rv32ima project to port Linux to other RISC-V chips based on the RV32 architecture.
The CH32V003 is the smallest chip in Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics’ RISC-V family, with the QingKe RISC-V core being a proprietary architecture developed by the company. The flagship model in this family boasts a clock speed of up to 144MHz, a maximum of 64KB of RAM, and 256KB of flash storage.
Although booting costs only 4 Baht, the actual performance is significantly slow, with boot times taking approximately 5 minutes. Real-world usage requires both external RAM and an SD card for data storage, resulting in the overall system cost being comparable to regular Linux development boards.
Source: GitHub – vlad1234/linux-ch32v003
TLDR: Vlad Tomoiagă successfully ported Linux to the low-cost CH32V003 microcontroller chip from Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics, which requires additional external RAM and an SD card for optimal performance.
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