LFS has been extremely educational for me. I have gone through it a few times, but I don't have a complete install yet. I just dabbled with it to get a better understanding and I plan to build a system around LFS in the near future.

At the same time, I have been looking over the internet to find other from scratch tutorials and came to a conclusion to ask this question here.

If I don't want a complete system, I just want to boot the kernel into a bash prompt and have some tools and maybe a compiler. Is there a tutorial to just get a kernel up and running.

There are 2 reasons I want to do this.

1. I simply want to create the most minimal functional machine not having a complete os.

2. I thought it would be a great hobby idea, to try to get a desktop to boot just like an embedded system, where the only thing that runs is 1 single application. Like an old school arcade machine. I do some programming and I am interested in making an arcade type game. It would be great to have a minimal boot system that dedicates the entire machine to the application.

Asking here is my first stop on trying to figure this out.

Why use linux at all?

Why not use DOS and place your application into the autoexec.bat
this will do exactly what you want...

I mean you could compile your own kernel and tell the bootloader that init=</the path to your program here>:

take a network-install version of Linux (Fedora, for example) and select the «minimal install» option. With that, you get your wish.