I was thinking this, too. Here's an even crazier thought: don't even make it rack mount. Make it NUC-sized. Two PB&Js stacked on top of each other, that's the form factor. EC2 except it lives under the couch.

All of their software is open-source, including the firmware. I bet this is actually possible for a subset of their tools.

Step 1 could be to get Illumos running on a local x86-64 machine.

I'm interested, tell me more. What about Oxide attracts a homelab user?

Yeah, a small-scale rack for home would be great to replace the beowulf cluster me and others are still stuck with. I'd probably pay a premium for it, given what I can tell from their product material.

You can! There are plenty of us running various minis or old equipment. The non-gimlet deploy pattern supports virtual networking with x86_64 "sleds."