For years, Alex used the same method. He would take a generic, pre-made Linux distribution, strip out the parts he didn’t need, and cram it onto his tiny device.
Poky (Yocto Project Reference Distro) 4.0 /dev/ttyS0 qemux86-64 login: yocto project getting started
runqemu qemux86-64 nographic The screen flashed, and a tiny Linux prompt appeared: For years, Alex used the same method
git clone git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky cd poky The elder pointed to a strange incantation. "Before you bake, you must set the table. Run this magic command every time you enter your kitchen." "Before you bake, you must set the table
"This is exhausting," Alex sighed one day, staring at a bricked prototype. "This generic system has a web server, a Python library for astrophysics, and 40 different keyboard drivers. My toaster only needs to toast bread and check the weather!"
"This is the price of control," the elder said. "But watch—the next loaf will be much faster because Yocto caches everything in a magical pantry called the downloads/ and tmp/ folder."