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>Miscelaneous: <a href=#klibc>klibc</a>, <a href=#glibc>glibc</a>,
37 <a href=#sash>sash</a>, <a href=#sbase>sbase</a>, <a href=#s6>s6</a>...</li>
42 <h2>Use case: standards compliance.</h2>
44 <h3><a name=susv4 /><a href="#susv4">POSIX-2008/SUSv4</a></h3>
45 <p>The best standards are the kind that describe reality, rather than
46 attempting to impose a new one. (I.E. a good standard should document, not
49 <p>The kind of standards which describe existing reality tend to be approved by
50 more than one standards body, such ANSI and ISO both approving C. That's why
51 the IEEE POSIX committee's 2008 standard, the Single Unix Specification version
52 4, and the Open Group Base Specification edition 7 are all the same standard
53 from three sources.</p>
55 <p>The <a href="http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html">"utilities"
57 of these standards is devoted to the unix command line, and are the best such
58 standard for our purposes. (My earlier work on BusyBox was implemented with
59 regard to SUSv3, an earlier version of this standard.)</p>
61 <h3>Problems with the standard</h3>
63 <p>Unfortunately, these standards describe a subset of reality, lacking any
64 mention of commands such as init, login, or mount required to actually boot a
65 system. It provides ipcrm and ipcs, but not ipcmk, so you can use System V IPC
66 resources but not create them.</p>
68 <p>These standards also contain a large number of commands that are
69 inappropriate for toybox to implement in its 1.0 release. (Perhaps some of
70 these could be reintroduced in later releases, but not now.)</p>
72 <p>Starting with the full "utilities" list, we first remove generally obsolete
73 commands (compess ed ex pr uncompress uccp uustat uux), commands for the
74 pre-CVS "SCCS" source control system (admin delta get prs rmdel sact sccs unget
75 val what), fortran support (asa fort77), and batch processing support (batch
76 qalter qdel qhold qmove qmsg qrerun qrls qselect qsig qstat qsub).</p>
78 <p>Some commands are for a compiler toolchain (ar c99 cflow ctags cxref gencat
79 iconv lex m4 make nm strings strip tsort yacc), which is outside of toybox's
80 mandate and should be supplied externally. (Again, some of these may be
81 revisited later, but not for toybox 1.0.)</p>
83 <p>Some commands are part of a command shell, and cannot be implemented as
84 separate executables (alias bg cd command fc fg getopts hash jobs kill read
85 type ulimit umask unalias wait). These may be revisited as part of a built-in
86 toybox shell, but are not exported into $PATH via symlinks. (If you fork a
87 child process and have it "cd" then exit, you've accomplished nothing.)</p>
89 <p>A few other commands are judgement calls, providing command-line
90 internationalization support (iconv locale localedef), System V inter-process
91 communication (ipcrm ipcs), and cross-tty communication from the minicomputer
92 days (talk mesg write). The "pax" utility was supplanted by tar, "mailx" is
93 a command line email client, and "lp" submits files for printing to... what
94 exactly? (cups?) The standard defines crontab but not crond.</p>
96 <p>Removing all of that leaves the following commands, which toybox should
101 at awk basename bc cal cat chgrp chmod chown cksum cmp comm cp
102 csplit cut date dd df diff dirname du echo env expand expr false file find
103 fold fuser getconf grep head id join kill link ln logger logname ls man
104 mkdir mkfifo more mv newgrp nice nl nohup od paste patch pathchk printf ps
105 pwd renice rm rmdir sed sh sleep sort split stty tabs tail tee test time
106 touch tput tr true tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode uuencode vi wc
111 <h3><a name=sigh /><a href="#sigh">Linux Standard Base</a></h3>
113 <p>One attempt to supplement POSIX towards an actual usable system was the
114 Linux Standard Base. Unfortunately, the quality of this "standard" is
117 <p>POSIX allowed its standards process to be compromised
118 by leaving things out, thus allowing IBM mainframes and Windows NT to drive
119 a truck through the holes and declare themselves compilant. But it means what
120 they DID standardize tends to be respected.</p>
122 <p>The Linux Standard Base's failure mode is different, they respond to
123 pressure by including special-case crap, such as allowing Red Hat to shoehorn
124 RPM on the standard even though all sorts of distros (Debian, Slackware, Arch,
125 Gentoo) don't use it and probably never will. This means anything in the LSB is
126 at best a suggestion: arbitrary portions of this standard are widely
129 <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
133 ar at awk batch bc chfn chsh col cpio crontab df dmesg du echo egrep
134 fgrep file fuser gettext grep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
135 gunzip gzip hostname install install_initd ipcrm ipcs killall lpr ls
136 lsb_release m4 md5sum mknod mktemp more mount msgfmt newgrp od passwd
137 patch pidof remove_initd renice sed sendmail seq sh shutdown su sync
138 tar umount useradd userdel usermod xargs zcat
141 <p>Where posix specifies one of those commands, LSB's deltas tend to be
142 accomodations for broken tool versions which aren't up to date with the
143 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>
146 <p>Since we've already committed to using our own judgement to skip bits of
147 POSIX, and LSB's "judgement" in this regard is purely bug workarounds to declare
148 various legacy tool implementations "compliant", this means we're mostly
149 interested in the set of tools that aren't specified in posix at all.</p>
151 <p>Of these, gettext and msgfmt are internationalization, install_initd and
152 remove_initd aren't present on ubuntu 10.04, lpr is out of scope, and
153 lsb_release is a distro issue (it's a nice command, but the output of
154 lsb_release -a is the name and version number of the linux distro you're
155 running, which toybox doesn't know).</p>
161 chfn chsh dmesg egrep fgrep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
162 gunzip gzip hostname install killall md5sum
163 mknod mktemp mount passwd pidof sendmail seq shutdown
164 su sync tar umount useradd userdel usermod zcat
170 <h2><a href="#dev_env">Use case: provide a self-hosting development environment</a></h2>
172 <p>The following commands are enough to build the Aboriginal Linux development
173 environment, boot it to a shell prompt, and build Linux From Scratch 6.8 under
174 it. (Aboriginal Linux currently uses BusyBox for this, thus provides a
175 drop-in test environment for toybox. We install both implementations side
176 by side, redirecting the symlinks a command at a time until the older
177 package is no longer used, and can be removed.)</p>
179 <p>This use case includes running init scripts and other shell scripts, running
180 configure, make, and install in each package, and providing basic command line
181 facilities such as a text editor. (It does not include a compiler toolchain or
182 C library, those are outside the scope of this project.)</p>
185 <span id=development>
186 bzcat cat cp dirname echo env patch rmdir sha1sum sleep sort sync
187 true uname wc which yes zcat
188 awk basename bzip2 chmod chown cmp cut date dd diff
189 egrep expr find grep gzip head hostname id install ln ls
190 mkdir mktemp mv od readlink rm sed sh tail tar touch tr uniq
191 wget whoami xargs chgrp comm gunzip less logname man split
192 tee test time bunzip2 chgrp chroot comm cpio dmesg
193 dnsdomainname ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip ifconfig init less
194 logname losetup man mdev mount mountpoint nc pgrep pkill
195 pwd route split stat switch_root tac umount vi
199 <p>Note: Aboriginal Linux installs bash 2.05b as #!/bin/sh and its scripts
200 require bash extensions not present in shells such as busybox ash.
201 This means that toysh needs to supply several bash extensions _and_ work
202 when called under the name "bash".</p>
204 <p>The <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal>Aboriginal Linux</a>
205 self-bootstrapping build still uses the following busybox commands,
206 not yet supplied by toybox:</p>
209 ash awk bunzip2 bzip2 dd diff expr fdisk ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip
210 gzip less man pgrep ping pkill ps route sed sh sha512sum tar test tr unxz vi
211 wget xzcat zcat</p></blockquote>
213 <p>Many of those are in "pending". Most of the archive commands are needed
214 because busybox tar doesn't call external versions. The remaining "difficult"
215 commands are vi, awk, and ash.</p>
218 <h2><a name=android /><a href="#android">Use case: Replacing Android Toolbox</a></h2>
220 <p>Android has a policy against GPL in userspace, so even though BusyBox
221 predates Android by many years, they couldn't use it. Instead they grabbed
222 an old version of ash and implemented their own command line utility set
223 called "toolbox". ash was later replaced by
224 <a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a>; toolbox is being
225 replaced by toybox.</p>
227 <p>Toolbox doesn't have its own repository, instead it's part of Android's
228 <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core>system/core
229 git repository</a> (this analysis looked at commit 51ccef27cab58).</p>
231 <h3>Toolbox commands:</h3>
233 <p>According to system/core/toolbox/Android.mk the toolbox directory builds
234 the following commands:</p>
237 ls mount cat ps kill ln insmod rmmod lsmod ifconfig setconsole
238 rm mkdir rmdir reboot getevent sendevent date wipe sync umount
239 start stop notify cmp dmesg route hd dd df getprop setprop watchprops
240 log sleep renice printenv smd chmod chown newfs_msdos netstat ioctl
241 mv schedtop top iftop id uptime vmstat nandread ionice touch lsof md5 r
245 <p>If selinux is enabled, you also get:</p>
247 getenforce setenforce chcon restorecon runcon getsebool setsebool load_policy
250 <h3>Other Android core commands</h3>
252 <p>Other than the toolbox directory, the currently interesting
253 subdirectories in the core repository are fs_mgr, gpttool, init,
254 logcat, logwrapper, mkbootimg, netcfg, reboot, and run-as.</p>
257 <li><b>fs_mgr</b> - subset of mount</li>
258 <li><b>gpttool</b> - subset of fdisk</li>
259 <li><b>init</b> - Android's PID 1</li>
260 <li><b>logcat</b> - read android log format</li>
261 <li><b>logwrapper</b> - redirect stdio to android log</li>
262 <li><b>mkbootimg</b> - create signed boot image</li>
263 <li><b>netcfg</b> - network configuration (sucks in libnetutils)</li>
264 <li><b>reboot</b> - Android's reboot(1)</li>
265 <li><b>run-as</b> - subset of sudo</li>
268 <p>Almost all of these reinvent an existing wheel with less functionality and a
269 different user interface. We may want to provide that interface, but
270 implementing the full commands (mount, fdisk, init, ifconfig with dhcp,
271 and sudo) come first.</p>
273 <p>Although logcat/logwrapper also reinvent a wheel, Android did so in the
274 kernel and these provide an interface to that.</p>
276 <p>Also, gpttool and mkbootimg are install tools.
277 These aren't a priority if android wants to use its own
278 bespoke code to install itself.</p>
282 <p>For reference, combining everything listed above, we get:</p>
285 cat chcon chmod chown cmp cp date dd df dmesg du fs_mgr
287 getevent getprop getsebool gpttool grep hd id ifconfig iftop init insmod ioctl
288 ionice kill ln load_policy log logcat logwrapper ls lsmod lsof md5
289 mkbootimg mkdir mount mv nandread netcfg netstat newfs_msdos notify printenv
290 ps r reboot renice restorecon rm rmdir rmmod route run-as
291 runcon schedtop sendevent setconsole setenforce setprop setsebool
292 sleep smd start stop sync top touch umount uptime vmstat watchdogd
296 <p>We may eventually implement all of that, but for toybox 1.0 we need to
297 focus a bit. For our first pass, let's ignore selinux,
298 and grab just logcat and logwrapper from the "core"
299 commands (since the rest have some full/standard version providing that
300 functionality, which we can implement a shim interface for later).</p>
302 <p>This means toybox should implement:</p>
305 cat chmod chown cmp cp date dd df dmesg du getevent getprop grep hd id ifconfig
306 iftop insmod ioctl ionice kill ln log logcat logwrapper ls lsmod lsof lsusb md5
307 mkdir mount mv nandread
308 netstat newfs_msdos notify printenv ps r reboot renice rm rmdir rmmod route
309 schedtop sendevent setconsole setprop sleep smd start stop sync top touch
310 umount uptime vmstat watchprops watchdogd wipe
314 <p>The following Toolbox commands are already covered in previous
315 sections of this analysis:</p>
318 cat chmod chown cmp cp date dd df dmesg du grep id ifconfig insmod kill ln ls
319 lsmod mkdir mount mv ps renice rm rmdir rmmod route sleep sync top touch umount
322 <p>Which leaves the following commands as new from Toolbox:</p>
325 getevent getprop hd iftop ioctl ionice log lsof nandread netstat
326 newfs_msdos notify printenv r reboot schedtop sendevent setconsole
327 setprop smd start stop top uptime vmstat watchprops watchdogd wipe
330 <hr /><a name=klibc />
333 <p>Long ago some kernel developers came up with a project called
334 <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klibc>klibc</a>.
335 After a decade of development it still has no web page or HOWTO,
336 and nobody's quite sure if the license is BSD or GPL. It inexplicably
337 <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
340 <p>In addition to a C library even less capable than bionic (obsoleted by
341 musl), klibc builds a random assortment of executables to run init scripts
342 with. There's no multiplexer command, these are individual executables:</p>
345 cat chroot cpio dd dmesg false fixdep fstype gunzip gzip halt ipconfig kill
346 kinit ln losetup ls minips mkdir mkfifo mknodes
347 mksyntax mount mv nfsmount nuke pivot_root poweroff readlink reboot resume
348 run-init sh sha1hash sleep sync true umount uname zcat
351 <p>To get that list, build klibc according to the instructions (I
352 <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#23-01-2013>looked at</a> version
353 2.0.2 and did cd klibc-*; ln -s /output/of/kernel/make/headers_install
354 linux; make) then <b>echo $(for i in $(find . -type f); do file $i | grep -q
355 executable && basename $i; done | grep -v '[.]g$' | sort -u)</b> to find
356 executables, then eliminated the *.so files and *.shared duplicates.</p>
358 <p>Some of those binaries are build-time tools that don't get installed,
359 which removes mknodes, mksyntax, sha1hash, and fixdep from the list.
360 (And sha1hash is just an unpolished sha1sum anyway.)</p>
362 <p>The run-init command is more commonly called switch_root, nuke is just
363 "rm -rf -- $@", and minips is more commonly called "ps". I'm not doing aliases
364 for the oddball names.</p>
366 <p>Yet more stale forks of dash and gzip sucked in here (see "dubious
367 license terms" above), adding nothing to the other projects we've looked at.
368 But we still need sh, gunzip, gzip, and zcat to replace this package.</p>
370 <p>By the time I did the analysis toybox already had cat, chroot, dmesg, false,
371 kill, ln, losetup, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, readlink, rm, switch_root, sleep, sync,
374 <p>The low hanging fruit is cpio, dd, ps, mv, and pivot_root.</p>
376 <p>The "kinit" command is another gratuitous rename, it's init running as PID 1.
377 The halt, poweroff, and reboot commands work with it.</p>
379 <p>I've got mount and umount queued up already, fstype and nfsmount go with
380 those. (And probably smbmount and p9mount, but this hasn't got one. Those
381 are all about querying for login credentials, probably workable into the
382 base mount command.)</p>
384 <p>The ipconfig command here has a built in dhcp client, so it's ifconfig
385 and dhcpcd and maybe some other stuff.</p>
387 <p>The resume command is... weird. It finds a swap partition and reads data
388 from it into a /proc file, something the kernel is capable of doing itself.
389 (Even though the klibc author
390 <a href=http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/klibc/2006-June/001748.html>attempted
391 to remove</a> that capability from the kernel, current kernel/power/hibernate.c
392 still parses "resume=" on the command line). And yet various distros seem to
393 make use of klibc for this>
394 Given the history of swsusp/hibernate (and
395 <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/333007>TuxOnIce</a>
396 and <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/242107>kexec jump</a>) I've lost track
397 of the current state of the art here. Ah, Documentation/power/userland-swsusp.txt
398 has the API docs, and <a href=http://suspend.sf.net>here's a better
401 <p>So the list of things actually in klibc are:</p>
405 cat chroot dmesg false kill ln losetup ls mkdir mkfifo readlink rm switch_root
406 sleep sync true uname
408 cpio dd ps mv pivot_root
409 mount nfsmount fstype umount
411 kinit halt poweroff reboot
421 <p>Rather a lot of command line utilities come bundled with glibc:</p>
424 catchsegv getconf getent iconv iconvconfig ldconfig ldd locale localedef
425 mtrace nscd rpcent rpcinfo tzselect zdump zic
428 <p>Of those, musl libc only implements ldd.</p>
430 <p>catchsegv is a rudimentary debugger, probably out of scope for toybox.</p>
432 <p>iconv has been <a href="#susv4">previously discussed</a>.</p>
434 <p>iconvconfig is only relevant if iconv is user-configurable; musl uses a
435 non-configurable iconv.</p>
437 <p>getconf is a posix utility which displays several variables from
438 unistd.h; it probably belongs in the development toolchain.</p>
440 <p>getent handles retrieving entries from passwd-style databases
441 (in a rather lame way) and is trivially replacable by grep.</p>
443 <p>locale was discussed under <a href=#susv4>posix</a>.
444 localedef compiles locale definitions, which musl currently does not use.</p>
446 <p>mtrace is a perl script to use the malloc debugging that glibc has built-in;
447 this is not relevant for musl, and would necessarily vary with libc. </p>
449 <p>nscd is a name service caching daemon, which is not yet relevant for musl.
450 rpcinfo and rpcent are related to rpc, which musl does not include.</p>
452 <p>The remaining commands involve glibc's bundled timezone database,
453 which seems to be derived from the <a href=http://www.iana.org/time-zones>IANA
454 timezone database</a>. Unless we want to maintain our own fork of the
455 standards body's database like glibc does, these are of no interest,
456 but for completeness:</p>
458 <p>tzselect outputs a TZ variable correponding to user input.
459 The documentation does not indicate how to use it in a script, but it seems
460 that Debian may have done so.
461 zdump prints current time in each of several timezones, optionally
462 outputting a great deal of extra information about each timezone.
463 zic converts a description of a timezone to a file in tz format.</p>
465 <p>None of glibc's bundled commands are currently of interest to toybox.</p>
471 <h2>Stand-Alone Shell</h2>
473 <p>Wikipedia has <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-alone_shell>a good
474 summary of sash</a>, with links. The original Stand-Alone Shell project reached
475 a stopping point, and then <a href=http://www.baiti.net/sash>"sash plus
476 patches"</a> extended it a bit further. The result is a megabyte executable
477 that provides 40 commands.</p>
479 <p>Sash is a shell with built-in commands. It doesn't have a multiplexer
480 command, meaning "sash ls -l" doesn't work (you have to go "sash -c 'ls -l'").
483 <p>The list of commands can be obtained via building it and doing
484 "echo help | ./sash | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/^-//' | xargs echo", which
488 alias aliasall ar cd chattr chgrp chmod chown cmp cp chroot dd echo ed exec
489 exit file find grep gunzip gzip help kill losetup losetup ln ls lsattr mkdir
490 mknod more mount mv pivot_root printenv prompt pwd quit rm rmdir setenv source
491 sum sync tar touch umask umount unalias where
494 <p>Plus sh because it's a shell. A dozen or so commands can only sanely be
495 implemented as shell builtins (alias aliasall cd exec exit prompt quit setenv
496 source umask unalias), where is an alias for which, and at triage time toybox
497 already has chgrp, chmod, chown, cmp, cp, chroot, echo, help, kill, losetup,
498 ln, ls, mkdir, mknod, printenv, pwd, rm, rmdir, sync, and touch.</p>
504 ar chattr dd ed file find grep gunzip gzip lsattr more mount mv pivot_root
509 <p>(For once, this project doesn't include a fork of gzip, instead
510 it sucks in -lz from the host.)</p>
516 <p>It's <a href=http://git.suckless.org/sbase>on suckless</a>. So far it's
521 basename cat chmod chown cksum cmp cp date dirname echo false fold grep head
522 kill ln ls mc mkdir mkfifo mv nl nohup pwd rm seq sleep sort tail tee test
523 touch true tty uname uniq wc yes
527 <p>And has a TODO list:</p>
531 cal chgrp chvt comm cut df diff du env expand expr id md5sum nice paste
532 printenv printf readlink rmdir seq sha1sum split sync test tr unexpand unlink
537 <p>At triage time, of the first list I still need to do: fold grep mc mv nl. Of
538 the second list: diff expr paste printf split test tr unexpand who.</p>
544 <p>The website <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/>skarnet</a> has a bunch
545 of small utilities as part of something called "s6". This includes the
546 <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/s6-portable-utils>s6-portabile-utils</a>
547 and the <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/s6-linux-utils>s6-linux-utils</a>.
550 <p>Both packages rely on multiple bespoke external libraries without which
551 they can't compile. The source is completely uncommented and doesn't wrap at
552 80 characters. Doing a find for *.c files brings up the following commands:</p>
556 basename cat chmod chown chroot clock cut devd dirname echo env expr false
557 format-filter freeramdisk grep halt head hiercopy hostname linkname ln
558 logwatch ls maximumtime memoryhog mkdir mkfifo mount nice nuke pause
559 pivotchroot poweroff printenv quote quote-filter reboot rename rmrf sleep
560 sort swapoff swapon sync tail test touch true umount uniquename unquote
561 unquote-filter update-symlinks
565 <p>Triage: memoryhog isn't even listed on the website nor does it have
566 a documentation file, clock seems like a subset
567 of date, devd is some sort of netlink wrapper that spawns its command line
568 every time it gets a message (maybe this is meant to implement part of
569 udev/mdev?), format-filter is sort of awk's '{print $2}' function split out
570 into its own command, hiercopy a subset of "cp -r", maximumtime is something
571 I implemented as a shell script (more/timeout.sh in Aboriginal Linux),
572 nuke isn't the same as klibc (this one's "kill SIG -1" only with hardwared
573 SIG options), pause is a program that literally waits to be killed (I
574 generally sleep 999999999 which is a little over 30 years),
575 pivotchroot is a subset of switch_root, rmrf is rm -rf...</p>
577 <p>I see "nuke" resurface, and if "rmrf" wasn't also here I might think
578 klibc had a point.</b>
581 basename cat chmod chown chroot cut dirname echo env expr false
582 freeramdisk grep halt head hostname linkname ln
583 logwatch ls mkdir mkfifo mount nice
584 pivotchroot poweroff printenv quote quote-filter reboot rename sleep
585 sort swapoff swapon sync tail test touch true umount uniquename unquote
586 unquote-filter update-symlinks
594 <p>Red Hat's nash was part of its "mkinitrd" package, replacement for a shell
595 and utilities on the boot floppy back in the 1990's (the same general idea
596 as BusyBox, developed independently). Red Hat discontinued nash development
597 in 2010, replacing it with dracut (which collects together existing packages,
598 including busybox).</p>
600 <p>I couldn't figure out how to beat source code out of
601 <a href=http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/git/mkinitrd>Fedora's current git</a>
602 repository. The last release version that used it was Fedora Core 12
603 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>
604 that can be unwound with "rpm2cpio mkinitrd.src.rpm | cpio -i -d -H newc
605 --no-absolute-filenames" and in there is a mkinitrd-6.0.93.tar.bz2 which
608 <p>In addition to being a bit like a command shell, the nash man page lists the
609 following commands:</p>
612 access echo find losetup mkdevices mkdir mknod mkdmnod mkrootdev mount
613 pivot_root readlink raidautorun setquiet showlabels sleep switchroot umount
616 <p>Oddly, the only occurrence of the string pivot_root in the nash source code
617 is in the man page, the command isn't there. (It seems to have been removed
618 when the underscoreless switchroot went in.)</p>
620 <p>A more complete list seems to be the handlers[] array in nash.c:</p>
623 access buildEnv cat cond cp daemonize dm echo exec exit find kernelopt
624 loadDrivers loadpolicy mkchardevs mkblktab mkblkdevs mkdir mkdmnod mknod
625 mkrootdev mount netname network null plymouth hotplug killplug losetup
626 ln ls raidautorun readlink resume resolveDevice rmparts setDeviceEnv
627 setquiet setuproot showelfinterp showlabels sleep stabilized status switchroot
631 <p>This list is nuts: "plymouth" is an alias for "null" which is basically
632 "true" (which thie above list doesn't have). Things like buildEnv and
633 loadDrivers are bespoke Red Hat behavior that might as well be hardwired in
634 to nash's main() without being called.</p>
636 <p>Instead of eliminating items
637 from the list with an explanation for each, I'm just going to cherry pick
638 a few: the device mapper (dm, raidautorun) is probably interesting,
639 hotplug (may be obsolete due to kernel changes that now load firmware
640 directly), and another "resume" ala klibc.</p>
642 <p>But mostly: I don't care about this one. And neither does Red Hat anymore.</p>
644 <p>Verdict: ignore</p>
647 <a name=beastiebox />
650 <p>Back in 2008, the BSD guys vented some busybox-envy
651 <a href=http://beastiebox.sourceforge.net>on sourceforge</a>. Then stopped.
652 Their repository is still in CVS, hasn't been touched in years, it's a giant
653 hairball of existing code sucked together. (The web page says the author
654 is aware of crunchgen, but decided to do this by hand anyway. This is not
655 a collection of new code, it's a katamari of existing code rolled up in a
658 <p>Combining the set of commands listed on the web page with the set of
659 man pages in the source gives us:</P>
662 [ cat chmod cp csh date df disklabel dmesg echo ex fdisk fsck fsck_ffs getty
663 halt hostname ifconfig init kill less lesskey ln login ls lv mksh more mount
664 mount_ffs mv pfctl ping poweroff ps reboot rm route sed sh stty sysctl tar test
665 traceroute umount vi wiconfig
668 <p>Apparently lv is the missing link ed and vi, copyright 1982-1997 (do not
669 want), ex is another obsolete vi mode, lesskey is "used to
670 specify a set of key bindings to be used with less", and csh is a shell they
671 sucked in, [ is an alias for test. Several more bsd-isms that don't have Linux
672 equivalents (even in the ubuntu "install this package" search) are
673 disklabel, fsck_ffs, mount_ffs, and pfctl. And wiconfig is a wavelan interface
674 network card driver utility. Subtracting all that and the commands toybox
675 already implements at triage time, we get:</p>
678 <span id=beastiebox_cmd>
679 fdisk fsck getty halt ifconfig init kill less mksh more mount mv ping poweroff
680 ps reboot route sed sh stty sysctl tar test traceroute umount vi
684 <p>Not a hugely interesting list, but eh.</p>
686 <p>Verdict: ignore</p>
692 <p>Somebody decided to do a <a href=https://wiki.freebsd.org/AdrianChadd/BsdBox>multicall binary for freebsd</a>.</p>
694 <p>They based it on crunchgen, a tool that glues existing programs together
695 into an archive and uses the name to execute the right one. It has no
696 simplification or code sharing benefits whatsoever, it's basically an
697 archiver that produces executables.</p>
699 <p>That's about where I stopped reading.</p>
701 <p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
705 <h2>OpenSolaris Busybox</h2>
707 <p>Somebody <a href=http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+busybox/>wrote
708 a wiki page</a> saying that Busybox for OpenSolaris would be a good idea.</p>
710 <p>The corresponding "files" tab is an auto-generated stub. The project never
711 even got as far as suggesting commands to include before Oracle discontinued
714 <p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
719 <p>The following additional commands have been requested (and often submitted)
720 by various users:</p>
723 dig freeramdisk getty halt hexdump hwclock klogd modprobe ping ping6 pivot_root
724 poweroff readahead rev sfdisk sudo syslogd taskset telnet telnetd tracepath
725 traceroute unzip usleep vconfig zip free login modinfo unshare netcat help w
726 ntpd iwconfig iwlist rdate
727 dos2unix unix2dos catv clear
728 pmap realpath setsid timeout truncate
729 mkswap swapon swapoff
731 acpi blkid eject pwdx
732 sulogin rfkill bootchartd
733 arp makedevs sysctl killall5 crond crontab deluser last mkpasswd watch
734 ipaddr iplink iproute blockdev rpm2cpio arping brctl dumpleases fsck
736 factor fallocate fsfreeze inotifyd lspci nbd-client partprobe strings
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