Well, it depends on your definition of "whole Linux". By it's nature, it can be stripped down fairly lean, especially if you know precisely which drivers you n

Well, it depends on your definition of "whole Linux". By it's nature, it can be stripped down fairly lean, especially if you know precisely which drivers you need, and don't need a lot of user-space support libraries, etc. It is possible for *nix to be very minimal, less so than in the old days, of course. But speaking of the old days, when I earned my bread as a CPU logic designer, I recall one grizzled OS developer's reaction to the looooong errata list for the A0 stepping of some new silicon: "Pffft. I can bring up Unix on a broken washing machine."