u/Ok_Road_8293

Hey all!

As a fun hobby project, I wanted to see what kind of Unix-like experience could be squeezed out of the RP2040 using bare-metal Rust (no_std) & ARM Assembly.

I ended up building Pico-OS, a tiny dual-core operating system that fits into just ~70 KB:

• Dual-Core SMP: Core 0 runs the shell, Core 1 handles real-time tasks with dynamic load balancing.
• 4-Pane tmux: Virtual split screens (split-v, split-h) directly over USB/UART serial.
• Live htop: CPU% per core, RAM, VFS, Swap, and interactive task manager.
• Storage: In-memory tmpfs + 1.0 MB persistent flash partition with delayed auto-commit to protect flash wear.
• Extras: Full math CAS (calc), nano editor, and a 95% RAM OOM-killer guard.

I'm planning to work on ESP-01 Wi-Fi modem and OLED drivers next.

Would love to hear your feedback, thoughts on the architecture, or any cool ideas you think would be fun to add!

(The project is fully open source on GitHub if anyone is curious: https://github.com/MortalErlik/pico-os )