I'm working on a musical instrument that uses FluidSynth for playing SoundFonts, works great. But I'm using Raspberry Pi (Raspbian) and there's a 30-60 second boot time, so I'm looking at other platforms with sub-5-second boot time. I'm really looking to replicate the experience of hardware synths, where you turn it on and it's ready to make sounds in a few seconds at most.
Has anyone had success building/running FluidSynth on an embedded platform with minimal OS, like Arduino, Teensy, Adafruit Feather, etc? Let's say the system has an SD card and DAC/amp to output audio to little speakers, but not a full POSIX environment.
My other approach might be to strip out unnecessary parts of Raspbian to get a fast boot time, but the documentation I've found still indicates it's hard to get under 10 seconds.