Hi Lonnie,
Now I want to reinvestigate all of this to see what might be achievable, but looking at the Genode Sculpt OS, it kinda seems like a bit of overkill for what I wanted.
I encourage you to take a second look. Sculpt OS is pretty much bare-bone. The default bootable image [1] is 27 MiB in size. With the wireless driver removed, the image weights only 16 MiB. This includes the kernel, the GUI stack, fundamental drivers (network, USB, NVMe, SATA, display, PS/2), and the software installation/update mechanism. It is specifically designed to be a suitable base for scenarios like the one you describe.
[1] https://genode.org/download/sculpt
If you find Sculpt OS not suited for your scenario, I would very much appreciate to learn why. So we can take your feedback into account for upcoming versions.
Also, I am wondering how much more advanced VirtualBox has become on Genode since when I last looked at it there was really no way that it could realistically be used for any type of real usage, but I am sure that has changed since then.
As one data point, I'm using Virtualbox on Sculpt as my only OS on my laptop everyday to get all my work done. ;-)
Anyway, I would like to get any thoughts or suggestions that the wonderful people on the Genode mailing list might like to offer as I am still interested in building out this ultra-small hypervisor project.
During the design of Sculpt, I actually had our previous conversations (from some years ago) in the back of my head. Back then, the attempt to replicate the NOVA demo based on Genode would have required too much effort on your side. So you understandably dropped out. Given this experience, one of the major goals behind Sculpt OS was to dramatically reduce this effort - to empower people like you to pursue product ideas without getting too much sucked-in into hairy technical details.
Should you succeed in using Sculpt OS as your base, I'd call Sculpt a success. If you give it a go and need further guidance beyond the documentation [2], you are always welcome to post here.
[2] https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-20-02
Cheers Norman