Linux Games Distribution on CD?

Priestess asks: "The story on Slashdot about the Xbox had much discussion on the advantages of coding, games especially, for a fixed platform. This made me start to wonder about all the things built into modern OS's that do nothing other than get in the way for games programming. Multi-User Multi-Tasking Memory-Protected OS's running X through a network socket, etc., are very useful indeed, but do you really need any of these things for a 'put in the CD and play' style OS? Clearly not. So I thought I'd ask, how hard would it be to develop a cut down version of the Linux kernel which basically just booted into single-user mode, perhaps with just a small partition mounted to protect the rest of the OS, dumped an image from the CD into RAM and ran nothing but a quick and efficient OpenGL OS? A Games Only free-OS which could be selected from LILO at boot?" Do you all think there might be a use for something like this? Getting into single user mode isn't all that difficult, but maybe there might be some advantage in having a Linux Games system by simply inserting a CD and hitting the 'on' switch.

"Obviously this could clear up a lot of space for the important things in a game, Textures, Sounds, Models, etc., and it could give the PC some of the advantages of a console, or at least remove some of the DISadvantages.

If this game-kernel could be made small enough it could even, if it were given the right licence, be thrown onto the boot section of a CD-ROM and allow simple turn-on-and-go operation like with the Playstation.

I probably don't know what I'm talking about here, perhaps there's less wasted stuff resident in modern OS's than it feels like there is and there'd be no point but it does seem like somewhat of a waste to run Quake in Multi-User mode through an X loopback network socket rather than just let the processor do nothing but throw polys at the graphics card. If it supported nothing but Sound cards and 3D OpenGL graphics cards, could PC games not be improved? Or is the idea of spoiling your uptime to reboot to a different kernel for running games just as abhorent as rebooting into Windows?"