YuzukiNeko Runs Linux on a Pi Pico-Sized RISC-V Board

A Linux SBC in a Microcontroller Footprint

The YuzukiNeko is a new open-hardware board from YuzukiHD that does something the Raspberry Pi Pico form factor was not designed for: run mainline Linux. It is built around the Allwinner F101, a single 1.008 GHz C907 RISC-V core, and it fits the whole thing into roughly the same 51 x 21mm outline as a Pico, with two 20-pin GPIO headers along the edges.

• SoC: Allwinner F101S3-CXX with one 1.008 GHz C907 RISC-V core, 32KB instruction and 16KB data cache
• Memory: 8MB or 16MB PSRAM depending on variant, plus 128Mbit NOR flash and a microSD slot
• Software: mainline Linux 7.2, Buildroot and Zephyr RTOS
• Display: MIPI DSI, RGB and LVDS output up to 1280x800, with JPEG and MJPEG encoding at 720p

The design files are published under CC0 on the YuzukiHD GitHub organisation, which describes the board plainly as a cute pico-sized board with the Allwinner F101S3.

Why the Form Factor Is the Point

There is a persistent gap in maker hardware between a microcontroller board you can solder onto a project and a single board computer that runs a real operating system. Boards in the Pico class are cheap, small, and stop at bare-metal or an RTOS. Boards that run Linux are typically credit-card sized and want a proper power supply.

The YuzukiNeko sits deliberately in the middle. You get a filesystem, a network stack, and standard Linux tooling in a footprint you can drop into an enclosure designed for a microcontroller. For anything that needs to parse a modern protocol, mount storage, or serve a small web interface, that is a meaningfully different starting point than an RTOS project — and it does it without the board growing.

The tradeoff is honest and worth stating: 8MB or 16MB of PSRAM is not a lot of headroom. This is a board for a focused appliance, not a general-purpose desktop, and the display engine hints at where it is aimed — small panels, kiosks, handheld instruments.

How Much Will the YuzukiNeko Cost?

It is not on sale yet, so there is no confirmed price. CNX Software notes the F101 chip itself reportedly runs around $2.70, and points out that previous YuzukiHD boards have generally sold for under $10. That is a reasonable expectation to hold loosely rather than a quoted figure.

If it lands anywhere near that, it would sit in the same impulse-purchase bracket as boards like the $6 Comu RISC-V USB board while offering something none of them do, which is mainline Linux.

Where It Fits in the RISC-V Board Landscape

RISC-V single board computers have been arriving steadily this year — see the Orange Pi Zero 4 with its Allwinner A733 for the higher-powered end, and the rest of our mini computer coverage for the wider spread. Most of that activity has pushed upward toward NPUs and desktop-class performance. The YuzukiNeko pushes the other way, toward the smallest envelope in which a general-purpose OS is still viable.

Fully open design files matter here too. A CC0 release means the board is a reference design as much as a product: if it ships and the community likes the layout, derivatives follow quickly. That has been the pattern with YuzukiHD's earlier boards, and it is the reason a project without a price or a ship date is still worth watching.

Sources: CNX Software — September 8, 2026; YuzukiHD on GitHub — September 5, 2026.