Good idea Alan! It definitely will help us.
*--Felipe Moura de Oliveira* Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/felipe-oliveira-75a651a0> On Wed, 5 Aug 2026 at 09:10 Alan C. Assis <[email protected]> wrote: > Even although I had worked at Espressif and I am a big fan of their > microcontrollers I completely understand the frustrations and issues caused > by this situation. > > Suggestion: since we cannot add this external HAL to Apache, we could put > it initially in GitHub.com/nuttx and slowly fixing the mainline to avoid > depending on this HAL. Hopefully most of the constructions come from three > Espressif contributors and all these three contributors have committer's > write, so they could contribute directly to this HAL. > > I think this way we can get back the independente of NuttX from its tied to > the vendor over the time. > > On Wednesday, August 5, 2026, Michal Lenc <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > unfortunately Espressif HAL has the same issue as most of the company's > > (not just Espressif) driven open source projects. It's open source, but > you > > can't really influence its direction because it's completely under > > company's governance and there is no community behind it. I think it was > a > > mistake to let 3rd party HALs into our source code instead of providing > the > > support ourself - yes, the time investment would be huge and our platform > > support has its own issues as well, but we sort of opened Pandora's box > > with it. > > > > I agree our long term priority should be to get independent from all 3rd > > party repositories and projects at kernel level. It's fine for the > > applications, but we should have full control of drivers and supported > > platforms. > > > > I would therefore like to ask whether it would be possible to maintain a > >> fork of esp-hal-3rdparty under the Apache/NuttX umbrella, with > appropriate > >> NuttX committers having write access. > >> > > > > espressif/esp-hal-3rdparty is under Apache license so I think it should > be > > possible to fork the repository and maintain it ourself under Apache. Not > > sure if there are any restrictions on bringing forks to Apache space > > though. But this would be a good middle ground between having no control > > and the need to write the entire platform support from the scratch. > > > > Michal > > > > On 8/5/26 02:20, Felipe Moura Oliveira wrote: > > > >> Hi all, > >> > >> I would like to raise a concern about NuttX’s dependency on Espressif’s > >> esp-hal-3rdparty <https://github.com/espressif/esp-hal-3rdparty> > >> repository > >> and discuss whether there is a way to give the NuttX community more > >> control > >> over the changes required for its development. > >> > >> The repository is publicly available, but it is maintained and > controlled > >> by a single private company. As a result, external contributions are > >> handled according to that company’s internal priorities and > availability, > >> which can make it difficult for the NuttX community to address issues > that > >> block our own development. > >> > >> As a concrete example, I opened espressif/esp-hal-3rdparty#13 > >> <https://github.com/espressif/esp-hal-3rdparty/pull/13>, it has been > open > >> for 28 days. It is a small change consisting of one commit and 15 added > >> lines across two header files—six lines in one file and nine in the > other. > >> The PR has been acknowledged, but it has not received a technical > review, > >> and there is no expected completion date. > >> > >> I understand that the Espressif maintainers have other priorities, and > >> this > >> is not intended as criticism of the individuals involved. However, I > >> believe it illustrates a governance problem for NuttX: changes required > to > >> support NuttX on specific hardware may depend on a repository whose > review > >> process and priorities are outside the control of our community. > >> > >> My experience while porting Dropbear <https://github.com/mkj/dropbear> > >> was > >> quite different. We encountered some problems during the port, but its > >> maintainer actively helped by reviewing the code, suggesting changes, > and > >> quickly accepting the corresponding upstream pull requests. > >> > >> I would therefore like to ask whether it would be possible to maintain a > >> fork of esp-hal-3rdparty under the Apache/NuttX umbrella, with > appropriate > >> NuttX committers having write access. Such a fork could continue > tracking > >> Espressif’s upstream repository, and generally useful changes could > still > >> be submitted upstream whenever possible. > >> > >> If maintaining a repository under Apache is not feasible or > >> appropriate, another > >> suggestion I have is to start building our own HAL and via kconfig > select > >> between the internal driver or the 3rd-party. If you have other > >> suggestions, please let's talk about them. > >> > >> > >> > >> *--Felipe Moura de Oliveira* > >> Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/felipe-oliveira-75a651a0> > >> > >> > > >
