Not sure of practical applications with super-cheap sizeable flash storage available everywhere, but it's nice to know you can still build a bootable Linux system entirely from scratch using simple instructions with latest kernels.
I might just give it a try for shits and giggles; I remember trying "Linux From Scratch" a decade or so ago and it took hours / days to get to a "bootable" state.
Getting a bootable system is quite easy actually. Build a kernel, build a static busybox, install grub. Thats almost it. Maybe build iw and wpa_supplicant, if you want wireless.
You can get to a bootable system within an hour or so.
But anything beyond that is a maze of vaguely specified dependencies. LFS was a good starting point, but i havent checked it for a while and I'm not sure it kept up with all the recent(ish) developments in distro building.
LFS is kept up to date. It has systemd and sysvinit variants, and the latest version was published in september. Thank god for this, because it's one of the only source to get a comprehensive list of all the components running on a Linux machine.
If you're booting from UEFI you don't even need GRUB. You can make the kernel a UEFI app, register it, and then just select it from the BIOS list (or whatever we're calling that "Press F8 during bootup" thing now)
I might just give it a try for shits and giggles; I remember trying "Linux From Scratch" a decade or so ago and it took hours / days to get to a "bootable" state.