[ChiefOBrien]

You shold try out buildroot[1]. It's used for building a complete linux image for embedded systems so the result is quite small, efficient. There are several guides online on how to build for Raspberry Pi, might support cloud as well.

[1] https://buildroot.org/

[mleonhard]

Thanks. Buildroot looks useful. The docs say to use a graphical program to configure it. The program edits a .config file which presumably could be code reviewed and checked into source control. Do you know of any open source projects that check in their buildroot .config file?

Reviewing a generated config file has downsides. The file does not show the context associated with changes. Comments are either unsupported or easily destroyed by the editor. The file format may be confusing or may destroy blame info by putting many options on one line. The file format and how to use the graphical tool are extra chunks of knowledge that engineers must load and maintain.

Buildroot is designed for folks making custom kernels. I don't need that. I want everything related to the hardware to just work. This includes automatically mounting attached network block devices on DigitalOcean & EC2 and configuring wifi on Raspberry Pi.