What Mikronix is

Mikronix is a Unix-like operating system for microcontrollers. It boots on the ESP32-C6 and on any POSIX host -- the same kernel, different machine backends. Every line of C was written by a small fleet of LLM agents under agent orchestration. There is no human author behind the code.

What Mikronix IS

• A freestanding kernel. No libc. Links -nostdlib, provides its

own libkern. No vendor blobs.

• A real ELF loader. Userland programs are real ELF files on a

filesystem, imports resolved against the kernel export table at runtime. Not a flat binary, not a shared library.

• POSIX-shaped. The syscall surface, VFS, /dev model, and task

model follow POSIX semantics. Programs include standard headers only.

• OpenBSD-style in layout. The tree looks like and is laid out

after OpenBSD: sys/ (kern, dev, net, fs, init, lib, conf), userland in bin/ sbin/ usr.bin/, man pages in share/man/.

• Driven by NetBSD reference. Reference priority: NetBSD, then

1. 4BSD-Lite2, Unix v6, OpenBSD. When the sources disagree, NetBSD

wins.

• KNF formatted. Tabs, K&R braces, 80 columns, static by

default, no fixed-size buffers, no mnx_ prefixes on functions.

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

them with dev_lookup_class(). Nothing under /dev is hardcoded.

• Real hardware, not emulation. Boots on the Waveshare ESP32-C6

1. 06" AMOLED board with serial console and framebuffer.

What Mikronix is NOT

• Not an ESP32 firmware. The ESP32 is the first machine, not the

definition. Machine-specific knowledge lives strictly in sys/arch/esp32/. A new machine = a new sys/arch/<machine>/ with zero changes under sys/.

• Not a framework. It is an operating system. FreeRTOS is a

temporary dependency, not a foundation -- drivers attach to the kernel, not to FreeRTOS tasks.

• Not C++. Pure C in the kernel and drivers. No C++ in

kernel/driver/fs. static by default.

• Not AI-hallucinated. Every line of C was written by language

models, but every line is auditable: the git log is public, SOURCE/ORIGIN blocks trace derived code to its reference, and the build is the proof.

• No fixed-size buffers, anywhere. Size first (fstat/tree walk),

allocate exactly, check every bound. No char buf[512] because it works.

• Not TCP-first. The network stack is not complete. It has the

driver model; TCP/UDP are work in progress. That is honest, not a deficiency.

The fork rule

If you fork or redistribute Mikronix, keep the provenance statement with the code. That is the only license condition beyond the BSD 2-clause text in each file.

See references for the full list of sources and standards Mikronix builds on.