Has anyone given any thought to a partition manager utility for x86 hardware?
Doesn't seem hard. I'd have difficulty with the UI part.
When you get new X86 hardware, you boot OpenWRT from a USB stick. Set up networking as normal. Then add the "partition manager" package, with a Ui to do the following:
Divide the HD into multiple OpenWrt partitions, with a single grub boot loader.
Download OpenWrt images directly from site, and install in specified partition.
Copy configuration from one partition to another, and install any additional packages.
The other thing I was thinking of, is that GRUB can be made to work on a serial port. So you could have a completely headless x86 machine, with say a Raspberry PI as a SSH to serial bridge.