OpenWrt run's on 4mb flash / 32mb memory devices. If you disable IPv6 / Wireless drivers and tune some more knobs you get probably something that boots a recent 4.14 kernel / musl / busybox from a 3mb squashfs and runs in 16mb memory.
Strongly trimmed linux kernel + minimal userspace based on klibc will certainly fit on 1.44MB. The dash (x86) built with klibc occupies something with <50kB in memory, below 100kB on disk.
