Related is cargo script for Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/unstable.html#scri... (nightly only)

You can do it out of the box with rust, no need for any tools, because you can strategically mix shell and rust in the same code: https://neosmart.net/blog/self-compiling-rust-code/

The latest keyboard version 3.0 is more standard. The swapped control vs caps lock position is something one can probably remap in software. The apparent lack of page-up/down and home/end keys would be more of a problem for me, though.

https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform-keyboard-30

The default firmware uses Hyper (the arrow pointing up and to the right) plus left/right for home/end and Hyper plus up/down for page up and page down. I'm not sure it's good enough either.

"The laptop probably has a HiddenVM. Drug and hit the person with this 5$ wrench until we get access."

https://xkcd.com/538/

One can also create small binaries with https://github.com/sunfishcode/origin (e.g., https://github.com/sunfishcode/origin/blob/main/example-crat... is in that ~400 bytes range) and select features as wanted without having to reimplement everything. Also see https://github.com/sunfishcode/origin-studio and https://github.com/sunfishcode/mustang - and of course https://github.com/sunfishcode/eyra

GARM can easily manage ephemeral runners for you: https://github.com/cloudbase/garm (Ephemeral runners are also more secure)

With GARM (GitHub Actions Runner Manager) it's easy to manage ephemeral runners: https://github.com/cloudbase/garm

One should also use workflow approvals for external contributors.

The setup is not too complicated with something like https://opendev.org/openstack/devstack

devstack is for dev work, expect nothing to persist.

If you want a deployment choose something like openstack-ansible.

Do any of the (soon-to-be) available non-metal offers support nested virt?

Main benefits are a fully mainline Linux kernel plus UEFI: You can throw a standard arm64 image at it and it will directly boot and get updates forever - no custom images with special bootloader setup and downstream kernel needed.

There is also the Rust TCP/IP stack https://github.com/smoltcp-rs/smoltcp which is not mentioned as reference (and it's probably more useful to have a look there than querying ChatGPT).