>>velcro+Lc
It was said to boot in 5s twenty years ago...

The hardware compatibility list shows a promising number of machines ( http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt ). If you have a spare one, you could try and report. There is a chance that you will achieve a very fast boot time.

--

AROS (Amiga) could reboot in ~7s, ~15yrs ago. And you can do more than you can with MenuetOS. Again, today you will probably break that record.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yNIuNnBrWg

Edit:

You can see here a recent AROS booting in 3s (it is not clear if it is bare metal though):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s_TfmF-_iE

>>mixmas+Wa
i had similar thoughts, and in modern times "just enough for containers" would be the business i guess.

baremetal os might be it the one tho

https://github.com/ownmac/BareMetal-OS

>>cylind+Oj
> KolibriOS has forked off from MenuetOS in 2004, and is run under independent development since then. All our code is open-source, with the majority of the code released under GPLv2 license.

https://kolibrios.org/en/

>>cylind+Oj
You are correct.

http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=22194

(MenuetOS is Ville's project)

The code was GPL, but kolibri did replace copyright headers and that was Ville's main gripe. Whether or not that breaks the GPL, I cannot say (they kept his name in the license file).

>>sitzkr+fg
This is probably a better link:

https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal

The one you linked to is a fork that is 83 commits behind a repo that is no longer maintained.

>>prmous+3e1
If you really, really want focused you can just drop everything and replace init with your editor http://informatimago.free.fr/i/linux/emacs-on-user-mode-linu...

>>velcro+zl3
You might like https://www.benjamin-schieder.de/nethacklinux.html

Replace nethack with your favourite editor, and it might just work. (Well, also replace the floppy disk with something faster.)