Notes from building a Linux for AI workloads: why a general-purpose base is wrong, what hardening buys, and why the power budget is a design constraint.
A distribution built to run everything is a poor foundation for a machine that runs one thing. The cost is not disk space — it is patching, auditing and blast radius.
A read-only root and a verified boot chain are not exciting features. They buy you the ability to know what is running, which turns out to be everything.
On battery-powered and fanless hardware, watts spent by the system are watts not spent on the model. Idle draw is a design decision, not an accident.
A package update that fails halfway leaves a machine in a state nobody designed. When the machine is a robot in a warehouse, that is a van and an afternoon.
Open source tells you what the code says. A reproducible build tells you that the binary you are running is what the code says — which is a different claim.