It's still missing an installer script but this is the closest I've gotten to building a network operating system where the only tools available are what is absolutely necessary.
Keeping with a fox theme the resulting name ended up being FennecNOS, Fennec because smol and NOS because Network Operating System.
It boots both Legacy Grub and EFI successfully.
The current image sits around 300MB, Build tools all removed so only runtime dependencies appear in the final image.
The list of software is pretty barebones. Just a simple glibc base with vim, ssh, wireguard, rust, tcpdump, bird, snmp, nload, vnstat, and sssd.
Essentially I have all the software my edge routers would have. Now it's a matter of getting it deployed somewhere.
Rix