Also check out Buildroot: https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/ It uses Kconfig to give pretty fine grained selection of what packages are included in

Also check out Buildroot: https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/ It uses Kconfig to give pretty fine grained selection of what packages are included in your file system and supports (painless!?) cross compilation by building the proper compiler toolchain or using a preexisting toolchain. Once you are happy with your configuration, you can save it e.g. as a "default config" and regenerate it repeatably, reliably, and effortlessly. It takes a while to do a full build, but caching speeds up rebuilds (you have to be careful to "rm" cached parts that you really do want to rebuild). make distclean && make <defaultconfig> && make I've been really impressed. I'm currently building for an embedded target on a AMD64 linux creating a x86 ISO that I boot on a VM for development when I don't have real hardware available and then building for our embedded ARM hardware when I get access to our prototype.