ksh93 has fairly small foot print and good built-in support.
With the right choices for the built-ins it can be a replacement for sh to provide better LiveCD performance.
Currently it breaks SMF and needs ON build level hack in the makefile.
Math library problem with non-SSE2 CPUs needs fixing.
See
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/belenix-discuss/2007-July/000078.html
and
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/belenix-discuss/2007-August/000255.html.