On May 19, 2026, hobbyist Nick published 'Boot Naked Linux,' a writeup that boots a stripped Linux kernel to a single static program in under a second inside a virtual machine.
In 1984, you flicked a switch on a Commodore 64 and, before you had time to think twice, you were staring at a BASIC prompt. Forty years on, you own a 16-core Linux workstation with a fast NVMe drive, and a minute of staring at a corporate logo is the going rate. One hobbyist has spent a few evenings asking when, exactly, that gap opened, and whether the operating system can be talked back into behaving more like the 1980s version of itself, at least on paper.
On May 19, 2026, Nick, the author behind the personal computing blog nick.zoic.org, published a build writeup under the project name "Boot Naked Linux," a label that captures the idea of stripping the kernel down until it hosts exactly one process and nothing else. The premise is direct: a Linux kernel that, on his hardware, reaches that single running program in under a second and then powers the virtual machine off. The running program is a C file of his own writing that prints a line and calls reboot(RB_POWER_OFF). Everything else a normal Linux system would do at boot, from mounting filesystems to starting services, is left out on purpose.
The structural point of the exercise is the contrast the author draws on his own machine. A stock Linux distribution's initial ramdisk on his PC, the small filesystem the kernel unpacks into memory before the real root filesystem comes online, weighs 73MB and contains 2,163 files. His custom ramdisk, in his writeup, is a single cpio+gz archive holding one statically linked C binary. Both numbers come from Nick's own measurements, and the experiment is reproducible with the command line he lists: kvm -m 1G -nographic -kernel vmlinuz -initrd initrd -append 'console=ttyS0'. The under-one-second figure is the experiment's claim, not an independently verified benchmark.
That contrast gets at a quieter question the piece keeps returning to: why did the initial ramdisk, a thing Linux introduced in the late 1990s to bridge the gap between the kernel and the real root filesystem, end up holding tens of thousands of files on a typical install? The kernel.org documentation for initramfs and rootfs describes it as a small filesystem image that early-boot code unpacks into a ramfs. In practice, modern distributions use that slot to load storage drivers, filesystems the kernel was not built with, decryption keys, udev, the early pieces of an init system, and the long list of glue that turns a kernel image into a usable operating system. Each piece is sensible in isolation. The combined cost, on a typical desktop or server, is the minute of boot time most users have stopped noticing.
Nick is not the first person to notice, and his writeup is honest about that. The piece links to blinry's "Building a tiny Linux from scratch", an independent tutorial from roughly a year earlier that pulls off most of the same stunt in Rust. Treating the two projects as evidence of a small, recurring idea is fair. Treating either of them as a production-ready system would be a stretch. Both are reproducible demonstrations that the gap between the kernel booting and a single program running is, in principle, well under a second on commodity x86 hardware inside KVM. What neither demonstrates is what a fair comparison to a stock distro on real workloads would look like, or what security posture a single-process host actually offers.
Three things would change the answer to "is this a trick or a pattern." First, an independent benchmark on real hardware, not just under QEMU/KVM, with a workload that does something more interesting than print a line and power off. Second, a real threat model for a host that runs one process. A stripped initial ramdisk with no udev, no init system, and no logging surface is also a host that gives an attacker fewer places to hide, but also fewer places for defenders to look. Third, a comparison against a tuned stock distribution using the same kernel and a workload the user actually cares about, run on the same hardware. None of those measurements exist in the source material, and adding them here would be invention.
The constructive reading, the one Nick's writeup gestures at without quite saying, is that the boot stack we accept is a design choice, not a law of physics. The kernel itself is fast. The minutes come from everything Linux learned to do in the time between turning on and becoming useful. A hobbyist with a static binary and a cpio archive can, on paper, give most of that time back. Whether anyone should is a separate question, and the one that decides whether projects like this stay curiosities or quietly seed a generation of stripped-down, single-purpose hosts for edge devices and ephemeral containers.