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These days you could solve the problem with virtualisation: boot a small ramdisk that loads KVM with GPU passthrough, and give it a block device that's an LVM snapshot or something similar that you can reset every boot. Pre-KVM, you could have used Xen with a paravirt kernel.

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I just made a live Ubuntu image that fits in 300MB RAM with libvirt.

I have a 5-year-old i5 computer with 8GB of RAM that I use as a Hackintosh with dedicated passthrough GPU, USB root hub, and an SSD. Having dedicated GPU and USB root hub are for performance obviously, but having a dedicated SSD means I could just pull the SSD out and plug it into a genuine Apple computer and it will work just fine. I have only two SSDs and didn't want to waste one of them to be the host OS, so I decided I would just pull another to-RAM trick to boot the host OS from a slow USB drive and put the host OS in RAM. The "abstraction layer" costed me 1GB. Just got done today, and I'm quite pleased with it. Now I have a "shell" distro that abstracts away my underlying hardware and gives me macOS regardless of what hardware I run it on.

KVM/qemu are dreams come true.

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