Mikronix

Mikronix is a Unix-like operating system for microcontrollers, written in pure C99, built the NetBSD way. It boots on the ESP32-C6 and on any POSIX host — the same kernel, different machine backends.

"It is Unix-like because that is the way to compute."

Status

v0.0.1 — the whole boot chain runs live on the Waveshare ESP32-C6 2.06" AMOLED board and ends at an interactive mikronix> shell prompt.

What it is

• A freestanding kernel, no libc. It links -nostdlib and is

its own libc (sys/lib/libkern/).

• An ELF program loader with a kernel export table — userland

programs are real ELF files on a filesystem, imports resolved against elf_ksyms[] at runtime.

• A scheduler, a POSIX-shaped fd layer on a virtual filesystem,

OpenBSD-style init (/etc/rc), and an interactive shell.

• Everything is a node in /dev. Devices register fops, apps

find them with dev_lookup_class().

• Kernel configuration is a NetBSD-style GENERIC file per

board; tools/config turns it into the device table (ioconf.c), exactly like config(8).

• Drivers attach through an autoconf model in the NetBSD

tradition: cfdriver, cfattach, cfdata — rtc0 at iic0, reported in dmesg style at boot.

The machines

• esp32-c6-amoled206 — Waveshare ESP32-C6 2.06" AMOLED:

SH8601 display, FT5x06 touch, AXP2101 PMIC, PCF85063 RTC, ES8311 codec — register-level drivers, no vendor blobs.

• host — the same kernel on Linux/BSD, built with cc,

pthreads, and dlopen. make kernel-host.

• esp32-classic — the Xtensa LX6 port, in progress.

How it is built

The tree is laid out after NetBSD: a machine-independent sys/ tree (kern, dev, net, fs, conf), per-machine backends under sys/arch/<machine>/, userland in bin/ sbin/ usr.bin/, man pages in share/man/. Reference priority: NetBSD, then

1. 4BSD-Lite2, Unix v6, OpenBSD. KNF formatting, C99, no fixed

buffers, no mnx_ prefixes on functions.

Provenance

Mikronix is AI-developed — every line of C was written by a small fleet of LLM agents (Qwen3.6-35B on llama.cpp) under agent orchestration. Konrad Lother, the inventor, had no plan of his own: he steers, decides, fixes the hardware, and reads the result to learn from it. See AI-PROVENANCE.md — and read the git log to watch an AI team build a Unix.

Repository

git.hiddenbox.org/lotherk/mikronix — kernel, drivers, userland, man pages, and this website, all in the open.