I wholeheartly agree with ❝devices people depend on to keep them alive would be running a -- version of the Linux kernel with anything unnecessary stripped out❞

I wholeheartly agree with ❝devices people depend on to keep them alive would be running a -- version of the Linux kernel with anything unnecessary stripped out❞. But the part with a ❝modified version (...) and probably a lot of custom stuff❞ made be shudder. The Linux kernel is a very well maintained piece of software, and whenever, in the embedded world, I've seen modification or larger forks of the stock/mainline kernel, they always were of worse quality and had more bugs than what I (or everyone else) has gotten used to when running mainline code (as is customary on your normal x86 PCs). That's because code-review actually works in Linux, and while it makes it sometimes very hard to get new features in, the ones that make it are usually well vettet.