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If only Tiny Core Linux had had better tooling and if only corporations liked simplicity, it might have been more popular…

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Bulidroot is popular and simple alternative. But corporations prefer complexity.

We at darkscience used buildroot for a simple ZNC SBC[0] distribution which we deployed to an Orange Pi Zero that we sold at 33C3[1].

It was great! I highly recommend!

It didn't take long to get started and while the compile times were pretty large (wonder if NIX or Bazel could help here?) it ended up with absolutely microscopic resource requirements.

[0]: https://git.drk.sc/Derecho/irc-sbc-buildroot

[1]: https://media.ccc.de/c/33c3

I've had a reasonable amount of luck with a combination of Buildroot and Bazel. I use Buildroot to assemble a minimal Base OS with just the kernel, bootloader and a few system services. Then the application layer is built with Bazel and assembled into a set of squashfs images which are mounted as overlay filesystems at boot time. The whole thing is shipped as a SWUpdate file built with the Bazel layer.

Because most of the iteration is happening in the Bazel layers I can generate a full system update in about 15 seconds with everything being fully reproducible.

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