Mar 02, 2026 Project update 40 of 40 Xous 0.10.0 - Introducing Baochip-1x Support by bunnie by
It’s been awhile! The last release was almost two years ago. In the intervening time, the Xous ecosystem has sprouted a custom chip, fabricated in TSMC 22 nm and made explicitly for the purpose of running Xous. The chip is called the Baochip-1x, and you are invited to participate in the "Dabao" campaign for evaluation board pre-orders.
Going to custom silicon removes the supply chain hardening benefit of compiling your own FPGA code from scratch, but it greatly reduces the barrier to entry: while Precursor costs about $600, the Dabao sells for about $9. To compensate for the lack of transparency into the physical construction of the chip, the Baochip-1x is packaged in a WLCSP with a polished back-side, facilitating IRIS-style inspection. You can’t check every wire and connection using IRIS, but it’s better than simply trusting that whatever is in a black plastic square contains exactly the chip you were promised, no more, no less.
This release marks the finalization of the boot0/boot1 artifacts for this chip. From the perspective of Precursor users, my goal is for you to notice absolutely no change. Thus, since there are no CVEs or new features relevant to you in this release, it’s safe to skip applying it.
Release Details For Developers
I’m the type of person who likes to run with a stable release on a piece of hardware forever - especially things that are integral to my workflow - so extra effort was put into ensuring that the behavior is identical despite substantial internal upgrades to the kernel.
That being said, here’s a few of the major things that happened in this release, which would be mostly of interest if you’re developing programs for the Precursor platform.
rkyv is upgraded to 0.8 . This makes serialization of most std objects very ergonomic, with the caveat that objects are strictly limited to one page of memory (going over that limit will cause a panic).
is upgraded to . This makes serialization of most objects very ergonomic, with the caveat that objects are strictly limited to one page of memory (going over that limit will cause a panic). xous-ipc was revised to 0.10; this is a breaking change for developers. In particular, the chat-test application needs to have its keys deleted and re-generated because the serialization format has changed. Also, xous_ipc::String
was revised to 0.10; this is a breaking change for developers. In particular, the application needs to have its keys deleted and re-generated because the serialization format has changed. Also, is fully deprecated. A number of libraries were refactored and re-organized to allow for a more slimmed down version of the OS. In particular, Baochip targets have fully on-chip RAM and ROM, so it's a step-up in difficulty to flip bits of memory as a physical attacker. This allows us to strip out some of the intermediate servers that are used to hide sensitive services.
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