I'd go with: - take Linux and hack it down pretty aggressively plus splice your code into it But rather than starting with a Linux distro and hacking it down,

I'd go with: - take Linux and hack it down pretty aggressively plus splice your code into it But rather than starting with a Linux distro and hacking it down, I'd start the other way: Boot the kernel directly (via a UEFI bootloader). You can embed a basic filesystem structure (/dev, /proc, /etc, etc.) in a binary blob inside the kernel file itself on build (kind of dumb that this is required at all, but it is)). The kernel itself has basically everything you'd need (for any reason you'd want a unikernel).