the network card i'm poking at, which has two different CPU clusters with Linux running on it, apparently has eMMC and NVMe drives onboard
also it has docker^W containerd installed by default
the operating system is booted by grub??
@whitequark that's probably the most common config for an x86 based embedded device of any kind, tbh. Sometimes that gets hidden behind an older proprietary CLI, like Cisco ROMMON, when you can clearly see GRUB booting Linux actually doing the heavy lifting over the serial console.