Hi Philip,
thanks for your interest in Genode and welcome to the list!
It may be a coincidence but I recently added a note about the SAFE network to our "Challenges" page:
https://genode.org/about/challenges
Really cool to see that the interest may be even mutual!
First question - from searching the archives I can't see any info on one of things I am interested in - what is the smallest bootable OS that can be set up with Genode? - could it be small enough to fit on a floppy disk?
It ultimately depends on the system scenario.
E.g., for a very simple scenario (log.run) on NOVA, the build system generates an ISO image of 3 MiB, which contains the NOVA hypervisor, Genode's core and init components, the dynamic linker, and a simple "hello-world" component. The content on the ISO is not packed though. In principle, GRUB supports gzip'ed boot modules. If this feature was used, the image would shrink to about 800 KiB. (I just gzipped the ISO to get a rough estimate)
For an interactive scenario, you may take os/run/demo.run as reference. It contains several drivers (VESA, PS/2, timer), the nitpicker GUI server, and a few interactive example applications. The ISO is 8 MiB (gzip'ed to 3 MiB) whereas a third of the size can be attributed to a single demo application (scout).
In short, you can squeeze a Genode-based system on a floppy. But such a system would be rather boring. ;-)
Cheers Norman