1 <html><head><title>toybox roadmap</title>
2 <!--#include file="header.html" -->
3 <title>Toybox Roadmap</title>
5 <h2>Goals and use cases</h2>
7 <p>We have several potential use cases for a new set of command line
8 utilities, and are using those to determine which commands to implement
9 for Toybox's 1.0 release.</p>
11 <p>The most interesting standards are POSIX-2008 (also known as the Single
12 Unix Specification version 4) and the Linux Standard Base (version 4.1).
13 The main test harness including toybox in Aboriginal Linux and if that can
14 build itself using the result to build Linux From Scratch (version 6.8).
15 We also aim to replace Android's Toolbox.</p>
17 <p>At a secondary level we'd like to meet other use cases. We've analyzed
18 the commands provided by similar projects (klibc, sash, sbase, s6, embutils,
19 nash, and beastiebox), along with various vendor configurations of busybox,
20 and some end user requests.</p>
22 <p>Finally, we'd like to provide a good replacement for the Bash shell,
23 which was the first program Linux ever ran and remains the standard shell
24 of Linux no matter what Ubuntu says. This doesn't mean including the full
25 set of Bash 4.x functionality, but does involve {various,features} beyond
28 <p>See the <a href=status.html>status page</a> for the combined list
29 and progress towards implementing it.</p>
32 <li><a href=#susv4>POSIX-2008/SUSv4</a></li>
33 <li><a href=#sigh>Linux "Standard" Base</a></li>
34 <li><a href=#dev_env>Development Environment</a></li>
35 <li><a href=#android>Android Toolbox</a></li>
36 <li><a href=#tizen>Tizen Core</a></li>
37 <li>Miscelaneous: <a href=#klibc>klibc</a>, <a href=#glibc>glibc</a>,
38 <a href=#sash>sash</a>, <a href=#sbase>sbase</a>, <a href=#s6>s6</a>...</li>
43 <h2>Use case: standards compliance.</h2>
45 <h3><a name=susv4 /><a href="#susv4">POSIX-2008/SUSv4</a></h3>
46 <p>The best standards are the kind that describe reality, rather than
47 attempting to impose a new one. (I.E. a good standard should document, not
50 <p>The kind of standards which describe existing reality tend to be approved by
51 more than one standards body, such ANSI and ISO both approving C. That's why
52 the IEEE POSIX committee's 2008 standard, the Single Unix Specification version
53 4, and the Open Group Base Specification edition 7 are all the same standard
54 from three sources.</p>
56 <p>The <a href="http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html">"utilities"
58 of these standards is devoted to the unix command line, and are the best such
59 standard for our purposes. (My earlier work on BusyBox was implemented with
60 regard to SUSv3, an earlier version of this standard.)</p>
62 <h3>Problems with the standard</h3>
64 <p>Unfortunately, these standards describe a subset of reality, lacking any
65 mention of commands such as init, login, or mount required to actually boot a
66 system. It provides ipcrm and ipcs, but not ipcmk, so you can use System V IPC
67 resources but not create them.</p>
69 <p>These standards also contain a large number of commands that are
70 inappropriate for toybox to implement in its 1.0 release. (Perhaps some of
71 these could be reintroduced in later releases, but not now.)</p>
73 <p>Starting with the full "utilities" list, we first remove generally obsolete
74 commands (compess ed ex pr uncompress uccp uustat uux), commands for the
75 pre-CVS "SCCS" source control system (admin delta get prs rmdel sact sccs unget
76 val what), fortran support (asa fort77), and batch processing support (batch
77 qalter qdel qhold qmove qmsg qrerun qrls qselect qsig qstat qsub).</p>
79 <p>Some commands are for a compiler toolchain (ar c99 cflow ctags cxref gencat
80 iconv lex m4 make nm strings strip tsort yacc), which is outside of toybox's
81 mandate and should be supplied externally. (Again, some of these may be
82 revisited later, but not for toybox 1.0.)</p>
84 <p>Some commands are part of a command shell, and cannot be implemented as
85 separate executables (alias bg cd command fc fg getopts hash jobs kill read
86 type ulimit umask unalias wait). These may be revisited as part of a built-in
87 toybox shell, but are not exported into $PATH via symlinks. (If you fork a
88 child process and have it "cd" then exit, you've accomplished nothing.)</p>
90 <p>A few other commands are judgement calls, providing command-line
91 internationalization support (iconv locale localedef), System V inter-process
92 communication (ipcrm ipcs), and cross-tty communication from the minicomputer
93 days (talk mesg write). The "pax" utility was supplanted by tar, "mailx" is
94 a command line email client, and "lp" submits files for printing to... what
95 exactly? (cups?) The standard defines crontab but not crond.</p>
97 <p>Removing all of that leaves the following commands, which toybox should
102 at awk basename bc cal cat chgrp chmod chown cksum cmp comm cp
103 csplit cut date dd df diff dirname du echo env expand expr false file find
104 fold fuser getconf grep head id join kill link ln logger logname ls man
105 mkdir mkfifo more mv newgrp nice nl nohup od paste patch pathchk printf ps
106 pwd renice rm rmdir sed sh sleep sort split stty tabs tail tee test time
107 touch tput tr true tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode uuencode vi wc
112 <h3><a name=sigh /><a href="#sigh">Linux Standard Base</a></h3>
114 <p>One attempt to supplement POSIX towards an actual usable system was the
115 Linux Standard Base. Unfortunately, the quality of this "standard" is
118 <p>POSIX allowed its standards process to be compromised
119 by leaving things out, thus allowing IBM mainframes and Windows NT to drive
120 a truck through the holes and declare themselves compilant. But it means what
121 they DID standardize tends to be respected.</p>
123 <p>The Linux Standard Base's failure mode is different, they respond to
124 pressure by including special-case crap, such as allowing Red Hat to shoehorn
125 RPM on the standard even though all sorts of distros (Debian, Slackware, Arch,
126 Gentoo) don't use it and probably never will. This means anything in the LSB is
127 at best a suggestion: arbitrary portions of this standard are widely
130 <p>The LSB does specify a <a href=http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/cmdbehav.html>list of command line
134 ar at awk batch bc chfn chsh col cpio crontab df dmesg du echo egrep
135 fgrep file fuser gettext grep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
136 gunzip gzip hostname install install_initd ipcrm ipcs killall lpr ls
137 lsb_release m4 md5sum mknod mktemp more mount msgfmt newgrp od passwd
138 patch pidof remove_initd renice sed sendmail seq sh shutdown su sync
139 tar umount useradd userdel usermod xargs zcat
142 <p>Where posix specifies one of those commands, LSB's deltas tend to be
143 accomodations for broken tool versions which aren't up to date with the
144 standard yet. (See <a href=http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/more.html>more</a> and <a href=http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/xargs.html>xargs</a>
147 <p>Since we've already committed to using our own judgement to skip bits of
148 POSIX, and LSB's "judgement" in this regard is purely bug workarounds to declare
149 various legacy tool implementations "compliant", this means we're mostly
150 interested in the set of tools that aren't specified in posix at all.</p>
152 <p>Of these, gettext and msgfmt are internationalization, install_initd and
153 remove_initd aren't present on ubuntu 10.04, lpr is out of scope, and
154 lsb_release is a distro issue (it's a nice command, but the output of
155 lsb_release -a is the name and version number of the linux distro you're
156 running, which toybox doesn't know).</p>
162 chfn chsh dmesg egrep fgrep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
163 gunzip gzip hostname install killall md5sum
164 mknod mktemp mount passwd pidof sendmail seq shutdown
165 su sync tar umount useradd userdel usermod zcat
171 <h2><a href="#dev_env">Use case: provide a self-hosting development environment</a></h2>
173 <p>The following commands are enough to build the Aboriginal Linux development
174 environment, boot it to a shell prompt, and build Linux From Scratch 6.8 under
175 it. (Aboriginal Linux currently uses BusyBox for this, thus provides a
176 drop-in test environment for toybox. We install both implementations side
177 by side, redirecting the symlinks a command at a time until the older
178 package is no longer used, and can be removed.)</p>
180 <p>This use case includes running init scripts and other shell scripts, running
181 configure, make, and install in each package, and providing basic command line
182 facilities such as a text editor. (It does not include a compiler toolchain or
183 C library, those are outside the scope of this project.)</p>
186 <span id=development>
187 bzcat cat cp dirname echo env patch rmdir sha1sum sleep sort sync
188 true uname wc which yes zcat
189 awk basename bzip2 chmod chown cmp cut date dd diff
190 egrep expr find grep gzip head hostname id install ln ls
191 mkdir mktemp mv od readlink rm sed sh tail tar touch tr uniq
192 wget whoami xargs chgrp comm gunzip less logname man split
193 tee test time bunzip2 chgrp chroot comm cpio dmesg
194 dnsdomainname ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip ifconfig init less
195 logname losetup man mdev mount mountpoint nc pgrep pkill
196 pwd route split stat switch_root tac umount vi
200 <p>Note: Aboriginal Linux installs bash 2.05b as #!/bin/sh and its scripts
201 require bash extensions not present in shells such as busybox ash.
202 This means that toysh needs to supply several bash extensions _and_ work
203 when called under the name "bash".</p>
205 <p>The <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal>Aboriginal Linux</a>
206 self-bootstrapping build still uses the following busybox commands,
207 not yet supplied by toybox:</p>
210 ash awk bunzip2 bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip
211 gzip less man pgrep ping pkill ps route sed sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi
212 wget xzcat zcat</p></blockquote>
214 <p>Many of those are in "pending". Most of the archive commands are needed
215 because busybox tar doesn't call external versions. The remaining "difficult"
216 commands are vi, awk, and ash.</p>
219 <h2><a name=android /><a href="#android">Use case: Replacing Android Toolbox</a></h2>
221 <p>Android has a policy against GPL in userspace, so even though BusyBox
222 predates Android by many years, they couldn't use it. Instead they grabbed
223 an old version of ash and implemented their own command line utility set
224 called "toolbox". ash was later replaced by
225 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a>; toolbox is being
226 replaced by toybox.</p>
228 <p>Toolbox doesn't have its own repository, instead it's part of Android's
229 <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core>system/core
230 git repository</a>.</p>
232 <h3>Toolbox commands:</h3>
234 <p>According to system/core/toolbox/Android.mk the toolbox directory builds
235 the following commands:</p>
238 dd du df getevent getprop iftop ioctl ionice load_policy log ls
239 lsof mount nandread newfs_msdos ps prlimit renice restorecon
240 sendevent setprop start stop top uptime watchprops
243 <h3>Other Android core commands</h3>
245 <p>Other than the toolbox directory, the currently interesting
246 subdirectories in the core repository are gpttool, init,
247 logcat, logwrapper, mkbootimg, reboot, and run-as.</p>
250 <li><b>gpttool</b> - subset of fdisk</li>
251 <li><b>init</b> - Android's PID 1</li>
252 <li><b>logcat</b> - read android log format</li>
253 <li><b>logwrapper</b> - redirect stdio to android log</li>
254 <li><b>mkbootimg</b> - create signed boot image</li>
255 <li><b>reboot</b> - Android's reboot(1)</li>
256 <li><b>run-as</b> - subset of sudo</li>
259 <p>Almost all of these reinvent an existing wheel with less functionality and a
260 different user interface. We may want to provide that interface, but
261 implementing the full commands (fdisk, init, and sudo) come first.</p>
263 <p>Also, gpttool and mkbootimg are install tools.
264 These aren't a priority if android wants to use its own
265 bespoke code to install itself.</p>
269 <p>For reference, combining everything listed above, we get:</p>
272 dd du df getevent getprop gpttool iftop init ioctl ionice
273 log logcat logwrapper ls lsof mkbootimg mount nandread
274 newfs_msdos ps prlimit reboot renice restorecon run-as
275 sendevent setprop start stop top uptime watchprops
278 <p>We may eventually implement all of that, but for toybox 1.0 we need to
279 focus a bit. For our first pass, let's ignore selinux,
280 and grab just logcat and logwrapper from the "core"
281 commands (since the rest have some full/standard version providing that
282 functionality, which we can implement a shim interface for later).</p>
284 <p>This means toybox should implement (or finish implementing):</p>
287 dd du df getevent getprop iftop ioctl ionice log logcat logwrapper ls lsof
288 mount nandread newfs_msdos ps prlimit renice schedtop sendevent
289 setprop smd start stop top uptime watchprops
294 <h2><a name=tizen /><a href="#tizen">Use case: Tizen Core</a></h2>
296 <p>The Tizen project has expressed a desire to eliminate GPLv3 software
297 from its core system, and is installing toybox as
298 <a href=https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Toybox>part of this process</a>.</p>
300 <p>They have a fairly long list of new commands they'd like to see in toybox:</p>
304 arch base64 users dir vdir unexpand shred join csplit
305 hostid nproc runcon sha224 sha256 sha384 sha512 sha3 mkfs.vfat fsck.vfat
306 dosfslabel uname stdbuf pinky diff3 sdiff zcmp zdiff zegrep zfgrep zless zmore
310 <p>In addition, they'd like to use several commands currently in pending:</p>
314 tar diff printf wget rsync fdisk vi less tr test stty fold expr dd
318 <hr /><a name=klibc />
321 <p>Long ago some kernel developers came up with a project called
322 <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klibc>klibc</a>.
323 After a decade of development it still has no web page or HOWTO,
324 and nobody's quite sure if the license is BSD or GPL. It inexplicably
325 <a href=http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/perl-isnt-going-anywhere-better-or-worse-211580>requires perl to build</a>, and seems like an ideal candidate for
328 <p>In addition to a C library even less capable than bionic (obsoleted by
329 musl), klibc builds a random assortment of executables to run init scripts
330 with. There's no multiplexer command, these are individual executables:</p>
333 cat chroot cpio dd dmesg false fixdep fstype gunzip gzip halt ipconfig kill
334 kinit ln losetup ls minips mkdir mkfifo mknodes
335 mksyntax mount mv nfsmount nuke pivot_root poweroff readlink reboot resume
336 run-init sh sha1hash sleep sync true umount uname zcat
339 <p>To get that list, build klibc according to the instructions (I
340 <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#23-01-2013>looked at</a> version
341 2.0.2 and did cd klibc-*; ln -s /output/of/kernel/make/headers_install
342 linux; make) then <b>echo $(for i in $(find . -type f); do file $i | grep -q
343 executable && basename $i; done | grep -v '[.]g$' | sort -u)</b> to find
344 executables, then eliminated the *.so files and *.shared duplicates.</p>
346 <p>Some of those binaries are build-time tools that don't get installed,
347 which removes mknodes, mksyntax, sha1hash, and fixdep from the list.
348 (And sha1hash is just an unpolished sha1sum anyway.)</p>
350 <p>The run-init command is more commonly called switch_root, nuke is just
351 "rm -rf -- $@", and minips is more commonly called "ps". I'm not doing aliases
352 for the oddball names.</p>
354 <p>Yet more stale forks of dash and gzip sucked in here (see "dubious
355 license terms" above), adding nothing to the other projects we've looked at.
356 But we still need sh, gunzip, gzip, and zcat to replace this package.</p>
358 <p>By the time I did the analysis toybox already had cat, chroot, dmesg, false,
359 kill, ln, losetup, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, readlink, rm, switch_root, sleep, sync,
362 <p>The low hanging fruit is cpio, dd, ps, mv, and pivot_root.</p>
364 <p>The "kinit" command is another gratuitous rename, it's init running as PID 1.
365 The halt, poweroff, and reboot commands work with it.</p>
367 <p>I've got mount and umount queued up already, fstype and nfsmount go with
368 those. (And probably smbmount and p9mount, but this hasn't got one. Those
369 are all about querying for login credentials, probably workable into the
370 base mount command.)</p>
372 <p>The ipconfig command here has a built in dhcp client, so it's ifconfig
373 and dhcpcd and maybe some other stuff.</p>
375 <p>The resume command is... weird. It finds a swap partition and reads data
376 from it into a /proc file, something the kernel is capable of doing itself.
377 (Even though the klibc author
378 <a href=http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/klibc/2006-June/001748.html>attempted
379 to remove</a> that capability from the kernel, current kernel/power/hibernate.c
380 still parses "resume=" on the command line). And yet various distros seem to
381 make use of klibc for this>
382 Given the history of swsusp/hibernate (and
383 <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/333007>TuxOnIce</a>
384 and <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/242107>kexec jump</a>) I've lost track
385 of the current state of the art here. Ah, Documentation/power/userland-swsusp.txt
386 has the API docs, and <a href=http://suspend.sf.net>here's a better
389 <p>So the list of things actually in klibc are:</p>
393 cat chroot dmesg false kill ln losetup ls mkdir mkfifo readlink rm switch_root
394 sleep sync true uname
396 cpio dd ps mv pivot_root
397 mount nfsmount fstype umount
399 kinit halt poweroff reboot
409 <p>Rather a lot of command line utilities come bundled with glibc:</p>
412 catchsegv getconf getent iconv iconvconfig ldconfig ldd locale localedef
413 mtrace nscd rpcent rpcinfo tzselect zdump zic
416 <p>Of those, musl libc only implements ldd.</p>
418 <p>catchsegv is a rudimentary debugger, probably out of scope for toybox.</p>
420 <p>iconv has been <a href="#susv4">previously discussed</a>.</p>
422 <p>iconvconfig is only relevant if iconv is user-configurable; musl uses a
423 non-configurable iconv.</p>
425 <p>getconf is a posix utility which displays several variables from
426 unistd.h; it probably belongs in the development toolchain.</p>
428 <p>getent handles retrieving entries from passwd-style databases
429 (in a rather lame way) and is trivially replacable by grep.</p>
431 <p>locale was discussed under <a href=#susv4>posix</a>.
432 localedef compiles locale definitions, which musl currently does not use.</p>
434 <p>mtrace is a perl script to use the malloc debugging that glibc has built-in;
435 this is not relevant for musl, and would necessarily vary with libc. </p>
437 <p>nscd is a name service caching daemon, which is not yet relevant for musl.
438 rpcinfo and rpcent are related to rpc, which musl does not include.</p>
440 <p>The remaining commands involve glibc's bundled timezone database,
441 which seems to be derived from the <a href=http://www.iana.org/time-zones>IANA
442 timezone database</a>. Unless we want to maintain our own fork of the
443 standards body's database like glibc does, these are of no interest,
444 but for completeness:</p>
446 <p>tzselect outputs a TZ variable correponding to user input.
447 The documentation does not indicate how to use it in a script, but it seems
448 that Debian may have done so.
449 zdump prints current time in each of several timezones, optionally
450 outputting a great deal of extra information about each timezone.
451 zic converts a description of a timezone to a file in tz format.</p>
453 <p>None of glibc's bundled commands are currently of interest to toybox.</p>
459 <h2>Stand-Alone Shell</h2>
461 <p>Wikipedia has <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-alone_shell>a good
462 summary of sash</a>, with links. The original Stand-Alone Shell project reached
463 a stopping point, and then <a href=http://www.baiti.net/sash>"sash plus
464 patches"</a> extended it a bit further. The result is a megabyte executable
465 that provides 40 commands.</p>
467 <p>Sash is a shell with built-in commands. It doesn't have a multiplexer
468 command, meaning "sash ls -l" doesn't work (you have to go "sash -c 'ls -l'").
471 <p>The list of commands can be obtained via building it and doing
472 "echo help | ./sash | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/^-//' | xargs echo", which
476 alias aliasall ar cd chattr chgrp chmod chown cmp cp chroot dd echo ed exec
477 exit file find grep gunzip gzip help kill losetup losetup ln ls lsattr mkdir
478 mknod more mount mv pivot_root printenv prompt pwd quit rm rmdir setenv source
479 sum sync tar touch umask umount unalias where
482 <p>Plus sh because it's a shell. A dozen or so commands can only sanely be
483 implemented as shell builtins (alias aliasall cd exec exit prompt quit setenv
484 source umask unalias), where is an alias for which, and at triage time toybox
485 already has chgrp, chmod, chown, cmp, cp, chroot, echo, help, kill, losetup,
486 ln, ls, mkdir, mknod, printenv, pwd, rm, rmdir, sync, and touch.</p>
492 ar chattr dd ed file find grep gunzip gzip lsattr more mount mv pivot_root
497 <p>(For once, this project doesn't include a fork of gzip, instead
498 it sucks in -lz from the host.)</p>
504 <p>It's <a href=http://git.suckless.org/sbase>on suckless</a>. So far it's
509 basename cat chmod chown cksum cmp cp date dirname echo false fold grep head
510 kill ln ls mc mkdir mkfifo mv nl nohup pwd rm seq sleep sort tail tee test
511 touch true tty uname uniq wc yes
515 <p>And has a TODO list:</p>
519 cal chgrp chvt comm cut df diff du env expand expr id md5sum nice paste
520 printenv printf readlink rmdir seq sha1sum split sync test tr unexpand unlink
525 <p>At triage time, of the first list I still need to do: fold grep mc mv nl. Of
526 the second list: diff expr paste printf split test tr unexpand who.</p>
532 <p>The website <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/>skarnet</a> has a bunch
533 of small utilities as part of something called "s6". This includes the
534 <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/s6-portable-utils>s6-portabile-utils</a>
535 and the <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/s6-linux-utils>s6-linux-utils</a>.
538 <p>Both packages rely on multiple bespoke external libraries without which
539 they can't compile. The source is completely uncommented and doesn't wrap at
540 80 characters. Doing a find for *.c files brings up the following commands:</p>
544 basename cat chmod chown chroot clock cut devd dirname echo env expr false
545 format-filter freeramdisk grep halt head hiercopy hostname linkname ln
546 logwatch ls maximumtime memoryhog mkdir mkfifo mount nice nuke pause
547 pivotchroot poweroff printenv quote quote-filter reboot rename rmrf sleep
548 sort swapoff swapon sync tail test touch true umount uniquename unquote
549 unquote-filter update-symlinks
553 <p>Triage: memoryhog isn't even listed on the website nor does it have
554 a documentation file, clock seems like a subset
555 of date, devd is some sort of netlink wrapper that spawns its command line
556 every time it gets a message (maybe this is meant to implement part of
557 udev/mdev?), format-filter is sort of awk's '{print $2}' function split out
558 into its own command, hiercopy a subset of "cp -r", maximumtime is something
559 I implemented as a shell script (more/timeout.sh in Aboriginal Linux),
560 nuke isn't the same as klibc (this one's "kill SIG -1" only with hardwared
561 SIG options), pause is a program that literally waits to be killed (I
562 generally sleep 999999999 which is a little over 30 years),
563 pivotchroot is a subset of switch_root, rmrf is rm -rf...</p>
565 <p>I see "nuke" resurface, and if "rmrf" wasn't also here I might think
566 klibc had a point.</b>
569 basename cat chmod chown chroot cut dirname echo env expr false
570 freeramdisk grep halt head hostname linkname ln
571 logwatch ls mkdir mkfifo mount nice
572 pivotchroot poweroff printenv quote quote-filter reboot rename sleep
573 sort swapoff swapon sync tail test touch true umount uniquename unquote
574 unquote-filter update-symlinks
582 <p>Red Hat's nash was part of its "mkinitrd" package, replacement for a shell
583 and utilities on the boot floppy back in the 1990's (the same general idea
584 as BusyBox, developed independently). Red Hat discontinued nash development
585 in 2010, replacing it with dracut (which collects together existing packages,
586 including busybox).</p>
588 <p>I couldn't figure out how to beat source code out of
589 <a href=http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/git/mkinitrd>Fedora's current git</a>
590 repository. The last release version that used it was Fedora Core 12
591 which has <a href=http://archive.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/source/SRPMS/mkinitrd-6.0.93-1.fc12.src.rpm>a source rpm</a>
592 that can be unwound with "rpm2cpio mkinitrd.src.rpm | cpio -i -d -H newc
593 --no-absolute-filenames" and in there is a mkinitrd-6.0.93.tar.bz2 which
596 <p>In addition to being a bit like a command shell, the nash man page lists the
597 following commands:</p>
600 access echo find losetup mkdevices mkdir mknod mkdmnod mkrootdev mount
601 pivot_root readlink raidautorun setquiet showlabels sleep switchroot umount
604 <p>Oddly, the only occurrence of the string pivot_root in the nash source code
605 is in the man page, the command isn't there. (It seems to have been removed
606 when the underscoreless switchroot went in.)</p>
608 <p>A more complete list seems to be the handlers[] array in nash.c:</p>
611 access buildEnv cat cond cp daemonize dm echo exec exit find kernelopt
612 loadDrivers loadpolicy mkchardevs mkblktab mkblkdevs mkdir mkdmnod mknod
613 mkrootdev mount netname network null plymouth hotplug killplug losetup
614 ln ls raidautorun readlink resume resolveDevice rmparts setDeviceEnv
615 setquiet setuproot showelfinterp showlabels sleep stabilized status switchroot
619 <p>This list is nuts: "plymouth" is an alias for "null" which is basically
620 "true" (which thie above list doesn't have). Things like buildEnv and
621 loadDrivers are bespoke Red Hat behavior that might as well be hardwired in
622 to nash's main() without being called.</p>
624 <p>Instead of eliminating items
625 from the list with an explanation for each, I'm just going to cherry pick
626 a few: the device mapper (dm, raidautorun) is probably interesting,
627 hotplug (may be obsolete due to kernel changes that now load firmware
628 directly), and another "resume" ala klibc.</p>
630 <p>But mostly: I don't care about this one. And neither does Red Hat anymore.</p>
632 <p>Verdict: ignore</p>
635 <a name=beastiebox />
638 <p>Back in 2008, the BSD guys vented some busybox-envy
639 <a href=http://beastiebox.sourceforge.net>on sourceforge</a>. Then stopped.
640 Their repository is still in CVS, hasn't been touched in years, it's a giant
641 hairball of existing code sucked together. (The web page says the author
642 is aware of crunchgen, but decided to do this by hand anyway. This is not
643 a collection of new code, it's a katamari of existing code rolled up in a
646 <p>Combining the set of commands listed on the web page with the set of
647 man pages in the source gives us:</P>
650 [ cat chmod cp csh date df disklabel dmesg echo ex fdisk fsck fsck_ffs getty
651 halt hostname ifconfig init kill less lesskey ln login ls lv mksh more mount
652 mount_ffs mv pfctl ping poweroff ps reboot rm route sed sh stty sysctl tar test
653 traceroute umount vi wiconfig
656 <p>Apparently lv is the missing link ed and vi, copyright 1982-1997 (do not
657 want), ex is another obsolete vi mode, lesskey is "used to
658 specify a set of key bindings to be used with less", and csh is a shell they
659 sucked in, [ is an alias for test. Several more bsd-isms that don't have Linux
660 equivalents (even in the ubuntu "install this package" search) are
661 disklabel, fsck_ffs, mount_ffs, and pfctl. And wiconfig is a wavelan interface
662 network card driver utility. Subtracting all that and the commands toybox
663 already implements at triage time, we get:</p>
666 <span id=beastiebox_cmd>
667 fdisk fsck getty halt ifconfig init kill less mksh more mount mv ping poweroff
668 ps reboot route sed sh stty sysctl tar test traceroute umount vi
672 <p>Not a hugely interesting list, but eh.</p>
674 <p>Verdict: ignore</p>
680 <p>Somebody decided to do a <a href=https://wiki.freebsd.org/AdrianChadd/BsdBox>multicall binary for freebsd</a>.</p>
682 <p>They based it on crunchgen, a tool that glues existing programs together
683 into an archive and uses the name to execute the right one. It has no
684 simplification or code sharing benefits whatsoever, it's basically an
685 archiver that produces executables.</p>
687 <p>That's about where I stopped reading.</p>
689 <p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
693 <h2>OpenSolaris Busybox</h2>
695 <p>Somebody <a href=http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+busybox/>wrote
696 a wiki page</a> saying that Busybox for OpenSolaris would be a good idea.</p>
698 <p>The corresponding "files" tab is an auto-generated stub. The project never
699 even got as far as suggesting commands to include before Oracle discontinued
702 <p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
707 <p>The following additional commands have been requested (and often submitted)
708 by various users:</p>
711 dig freeramdisk getty halt hexdump hwclock klogd modprobe ping ping6 pivot_root
712 poweroff readahead rev sfdisk sudo syslogd taskset telnet telnetd tracepath
713 traceroute unzip usleep vconfig zip free login modinfo unshare netcat help w
714 ntpd iwconfig iwlist rdate
715 dos2unix unix2dos catv clear
716 pmap realpath setsid timeout truncate
717 mkswap swapon swapoff
719 acpi blkid eject pwdx
720 sulogin rfkill bootchartd
721 arp makedevs sysctl killall5 crond crontab deluser last mkpasswd watch
722 ipaddr iplink iproute blockdev rpm2cpio arping brctl dumpleases fsck
724 factor fallocate fsfreeze inotifyd lspci nbd-client partprobe strings
729 <!-- #include "footer.html" -->