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 <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/toolbox/Android.mk>
235 system/core/toolbox/Android.mk</a> the toolbox directory builds the
236 following commands:</p>
239 dd du df getevent iftop ioctl ionice log ls
240 lsof mount nandread newfs_msdos ps prlimit renice
241 sendevent start stop top uptime watchprops
244 <h3>Other Android core commands</h3>
246 <p>Other than the toolbox directory, the currently interesting
247 subdirectories in the core repository are gpttool, init,
248 logcat, logwrapper, mkbootimg, reboot, and run-as.</p>
251 <li><b>gpttool</b> - subset of fdisk</li>
252 <li><b>init</b> - Android's PID 1</li>
253 <li><b>logcat</b> - read android log format</li>
254 <li><b>logwrapper</b> - redirect stdio to android log</li>
255 <li><b>mkbootimg</b> - create signed boot image</li>
256 <li><b>reboot</b> - Android's reboot(1)</li>
257 <li><b>run-as</b> - subset of sudo</li>
260 <p>Almost all of these reinvent an existing wheel with less functionality and a
261 different user interface. We may want to provide that interface, but
262 implementing the full commands (fdisk, init, and sudo) come first.</p>
264 <p>Also, gpttool and mkbootimg are install tools.
265 These aren't a priority if android wants to use its own
266 bespoke code to install itself.</p>
270 <p>For reference, combining everything listed above, we get:</p>
273 dd du df getevent gpttool iftop init ioctl ionice
274 log logcat logwrapper ls lsof mkbootimg mount nandread
275 newfs_msdos ps prlimit reboot renice run-as
276 sendevent start stop top uptime watchprops
279 <p>We may eventually implement all of that, but for toybox 1.0 we need to
280 focus a bit. For our first pass, let's ignore selinux [note: the android
281 guys submitted selinux code to us and we merged it],
282 and grab just logcat and logwrapper from the "core"
283 commands (since the rest have some full/standard version providing that
284 functionality, which we can implement a shim interface for later).</p>
286 <p>This means toybox should implement (or finish implementing):</p>
289 dd du df getevent iftop ioctl ionice log logcat logwrapper ls lsof
290 mount nandread newfs_msdos ps prlimit renice schedtop sendevent
291 smd start stop top uptime watchprops
296 <h2><a name=tizen /><a href="#tizen">Use case: Tizen Core</a></h2>
298 <p>The Tizen project has expressed a desire to eliminate GPLv3 software
299 from its core system, and is installing toybox as
300 <a href=https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Toybox>part of this process</a>.</p>
302 <p>They have a fairly long list of new commands they'd like to see in toybox:</p>
306 arch base64 users dir vdir unexpand shred join csplit
307 hostid nproc runcon sha224 sha256 sha384 sha512 sha3 mkfs.vfat fsck.vfat
308 dosfslabel uname stdbuf pinky diff3 sdiff zcmp zdiff zegrep zfgrep zless zmore
312 <p>In addition, they'd like to use several commands currently in pending:</p>
316 tar diff printf wget rsync fdisk vi less tr test stty fold expr dd
320 <p>Also, tizen uses a different Linux Security Module called SMACK, so
321 many of the SELinux options ala ls -Z need smack alternatives in an
324 <hr /><a name=klibc />
327 <p>Long ago some kernel developers came up with a project called
328 <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klibc>klibc</a>.
329 After a decade of development it still has no web page or HOWTO,
330 and nobody's quite sure if the license is BSD or GPL. It inexplicably
331 <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
334 <p>In addition to a C library even less capable than bionic (obsoleted by
335 musl), klibc builds a random assortment of executables to run init scripts
336 with. There's no multiplexer command, these are individual executables:</p>
339 cat chroot cpio dd dmesg false fixdep fstype gunzip gzip halt ipconfig kill
340 kinit ln losetup ls minips mkdir mkfifo mknodes
341 mksyntax mount mv nfsmount nuke pivot_root poweroff readlink reboot resume
342 run-init sh sha1hash sleep sync true umount uname zcat
345 <p>To get that list, build klibc according to the instructions (I
346 <a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#23-01-2013>looked at</a> version
347 2.0.2 and did cd klibc-*; ln -s /output/of/kernel/make/headers_install
348 linux; make) then <b>echo $(for i in $(find . -type f); do file $i | grep -q
349 executable && basename $i; done | grep -v '[.]g$' | sort -u)</b> to find
350 executables, then eliminated the *.so files and *.shared duplicates.</p>
352 <p>Some of those binaries are build-time tools that don't get installed,
353 which removes mknodes, mksyntax, sha1hash, and fixdep from the list.
354 (And sha1hash is just an unpolished sha1sum anyway.)</p>
356 <p>The run-init command is more commonly called switch_root, nuke is just
357 "rm -rf -- $@", and minips is more commonly called "ps". I'm not doing aliases
358 for the oddball names.</p>
360 <p>Yet more stale forks of dash and gzip sucked in here (see "dubious
361 license terms" above), adding nothing to the other projects we've looked at.
362 But we still need sh, gunzip, gzip, and zcat to replace this package.</p>
364 <p>By the time I did the analysis toybox already had cat, chroot, dmesg, false,
365 kill, ln, losetup, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, readlink, rm, switch_root, sleep, sync,
368 <p>The low hanging fruit is cpio, dd, ps, mv, and pivot_root.</p>
370 <p>The "kinit" command is another gratuitous rename, it's init running as PID 1.
371 The halt, poweroff, and reboot commands work with it.</p>
373 <p>I've got mount and umount queued up already, fstype and nfsmount go with
374 those. (And probably smbmount and p9mount, but this hasn't got one. Those
375 are all about querying for login credentials, probably workable into the
376 base mount command.)</p>
378 <p>The ipconfig command here has a built in dhcp client, so it's ifconfig
379 and dhcpcd and maybe some other stuff.</p>
381 <p>The resume command is... weird. It finds a swap partition and reads data
382 from it into a /proc file, something the kernel is capable of doing itself.
383 (Even though the klibc author
384 <a href=http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/klibc/2006-June/001748.html>attempted
385 to remove</a> that capability from the kernel, current kernel/power/hibernate.c
386 still parses "resume=" on the command line). And yet various distros seem to
387 make use of klibc for this.
388 Given the history of swsusp/hibernate (and
389 <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/333007>TuxOnIce</a>
390 and <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/242107>kexec jump</a>) I've lost track
391 of the current state of the art here. Ah, Documentation/power/userland-swsusp.txt
392 has the API docs, and <a href=http://suspend.sf.net>here's a better
395 <p>So the list of things actually in klibc are:</p>
399 cat chroot dmesg false kill ln losetup ls mkdir mkfifo readlink rm switch_root
400 sleep sync true uname
402 cpio dd ps mv pivot_root
403 mount nfsmount fstype umount
405 kinit halt poweroff reboot
415 <p>Rather a lot of command line utilities come bundled with glibc:</p>
418 catchsegv getconf getent iconv iconvconfig ldconfig ldd locale localedef
419 mtrace nscd rpcent rpcinfo tzselect zdump zic
422 <p>Of those, musl libc only implements ldd.</p>
424 <p>catchsegv is a rudimentary debugger, probably out of scope for toybox.</p>
426 <p>iconv has been <a href="#susv4">previously discussed</a>.</p>
428 <p>iconvconfig is only relevant if iconv is user-configurable; musl uses a
429 non-configurable iconv.</p>
431 <p>getconf is a posix utility which displays several variables from
432 unistd.h; it probably belongs in the development toolchain.</p>
434 <p>getent handles retrieving entries from passwd-style databases
435 (in a rather lame way) and is trivially replacable by grep.</p>
437 <p>locale was discussed under <a href=#susv4>posix</a>.
438 localedef compiles locale definitions, which musl currently does not use.</p>
440 <p>mtrace is a perl script to use the malloc debugging that glibc has built-in;
441 this is not relevant for musl, and would necessarily vary with libc. </p>
443 <p>nscd is a name service caching daemon, which is not yet relevant for musl.
444 rpcinfo and rpcent are related to rpc, which musl does not include.</p>
446 <p>The remaining commands involve glibc's bundled timezone database,
447 which seems to be derived from the <a href=http://www.iana.org/time-zones>IANA
448 timezone database</a>. Unless we want to maintain our own fork of the
449 standards body's database like glibc does, these are of no interest,
450 but for completeness:</p>
452 <p>tzselect outputs a TZ variable correponding to user input.
453 The documentation does not indicate how to use it in a script, but it seems
454 that Debian may have done so.
455 zdump prints current time in each of several timezones, optionally
456 outputting a great deal of extra information about each timezone.
457 zic converts a description of a timezone to a file in tz format.</p>
459 <p>None of glibc's bundled commands are currently of interest to toybox.</p>
465 <h2>Stand-Alone Shell</h2>
467 <p>Wikipedia has <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-alone_shell>a good
468 summary of sash</a>, with links. The original Stand-Alone Shell project reached
469 a stopping point, and then <a href=http://www.baiti.net/sash>"sash plus
470 patches"</a> extended it a bit further. The result is a megabyte executable
471 that provides 40 commands.</p>
473 <p>Sash is a shell with built-in commands. It doesn't have a multiplexer
474 command, meaning "sash ls -l" doesn't work (you have to go "sash -c 'ls -l'").
477 <p>The list of commands can be obtained via building it and doing
478 "echo help | ./sash | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/^-//' | xargs echo", which
482 alias aliasall ar cd chattr chgrp chmod chown cmp cp chroot dd echo ed exec
483 exit file find grep gunzip gzip help kill losetup losetup ln ls lsattr mkdir
484 mknod more mount mv pivot_root printenv prompt pwd quit rm rmdir setenv source
485 sum sync tar touch umask umount unalias where
488 <p>Plus sh because it's a shell. A dozen or so commands can only sanely be
489 implemented as shell builtins (alias aliasall cd exec exit prompt quit setenv
490 source umask unalias), where is an alias for which, and at triage time toybox
491 already has chgrp, chmod, chown, cmp, cp, chroot, echo, help, kill, losetup,
492 ln, ls, mkdir, mknod, printenv, pwd, rm, rmdir, sync, and touch.</p>
498 ar chattr dd ed file find grep gunzip gzip lsattr more mount mv pivot_root
503 <p>(For once, this project doesn't include a fork of gzip, instead
504 it sucks in -lz from the host.)</p>
510 <p>It's <a href=http://git.suckless.org/sbase>on suckless</a>. So far it's
515 basename cat chmod chown cksum cmp cp date dirname echo false fold grep head
516 kill ln ls mc mkdir mkfifo mv nl nohup pwd rm seq sleep sort tail tee test
517 touch true tty uname uniq wc yes
521 <p>And has a TODO list:</p>
525 cal chgrp chvt comm cut df diff du env expand expr id md5sum nice paste
526 printenv printf readlink rmdir seq sha1sum split sync test tr unexpand unlink
531 <p>At triage time, of the first list I still need to do: fold grep mc mv nl. Of
532 the second list: diff expr paste printf split test tr unexpand who.</p>
538 <p>The website <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/>skarnet</a> has a bunch
539 of small utilities as part of something called "s6". This includes the
540 <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/s6-portable-utils>s6-portabile-utils</a>
541 and the <a href=http://skarnet.org/software/s6-linux-utils>s6-linux-utils</a>.
544 <p>Both packages rely on multiple bespoke external libraries without which
545 they can't compile. The source is completely uncommented and doesn't wrap at
546 80 characters. Doing a find for *.c files brings up the following commands:</p>
550 basename cat chmod chown chroot clock cut devd dirname echo env expr false
551 format-filter freeramdisk grep halt head hiercopy hostname linkname ln
552 logwatch ls maximumtime memoryhog mkdir mkfifo mount nice nuke pause
553 pivotchroot poweroff printenv quote quote-filter reboot rename rmrf sleep
554 sort swapoff swapon sync tail test touch true umount uniquename unquote
555 unquote-filter update-symlinks
559 <p>Triage: memoryhog isn't even listed on the website nor does it have
560 a documentation file, clock seems like a subset
561 of date, devd is some sort of netlink wrapper that spawns its command line
562 every time it gets a message (maybe this is meant to implement part of
563 udev/mdev?), format-filter is sort of awk's '{print $2}' function split out
564 into its own command, hiercopy a subset of "cp -r", maximumtime is something
565 I implemented as a shell script (more/timeout.sh in Aboriginal Linux),
566 nuke isn't the same as klibc (this one's "kill SIG -1" only with hardwared
567 SIG options), pause is a program that literally waits to be killed (I
568 generally sleep 999999999 which is a little over 30 years),
569 pivotchroot is a subset of switch_root, rmrf is rm -rf...</p>
571 <p>I see "nuke" resurface, and if "rmrf" wasn't also here I might think
572 klibc had a point.</b>
575 basename cat chmod chown chroot cut dirname echo env expr false
576 freeramdisk grep halt head hostname linkname ln
577 logwatch ls mkdir mkfifo mount nice
578 pivotchroot poweroff printenv quote quote-filter reboot rename sleep
579 sort swapoff swapon sync tail test touch true umount uniquename unquote
580 unquote-filter update-symlinks
588 <p>Red Hat's nash was part of its "mkinitrd" package, replacement for a shell
589 and utilities on the boot floppy back in the 1990's (the same general idea
590 as BusyBox, developed independently). Red Hat discontinued nash development
591 in 2010, replacing it with dracut (which collects together existing packages,
592 including busybox).</p>
594 <p>I couldn't figure out how to beat source code out of
595 <a href=http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/git/mkinitrd>Fedora's current git</a>
596 repository. The last release version that used it was Fedora Core 12
597 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>
598 that can be unwound with "rpm2cpio mkinitrd.src.rpm | cpio -i -d -H newc
599 --no-absolute-filenames" and in there is a mkinitrd-6.0.93.tar.bz2 which
602 <p>In addition to being a bit like a command shell, the nash man page lists the
603 following commands:</p>
606 access echo find losetup mkdevices mkdir mknod mkdmnod mkrootdev mount
607 pivot_root readlink raidautorun setquiet showlabels sleep switchroot umount
610 <p>Oddly, the only occurrence of the string pivot_root in the nash source code
611 is in the man page, the command isn't there. (It seems to have been removed
612 when the underscoreless switchroot went in.)</p>
614 <p>A more complete list seems to be the handlers[] array in nash.c:</p>
617 access buildEnv cat cond cp daemonize dm echo exec exit find kernelopt
618 loadDrivers loadpolicy mkchardevs mkblktab mkblkdevs mkdir mkdmnod mknod
619 mkrootdev mount netname network null plymouth hotplug killplug losetup
620 ln ls raidautorun readlink resume resolveDevice rmparts setDeviceEnv
621 setquiet setuproot showelfinterp showlabels sleep stabilized status switchroot
625 <p>This list is nuts: "plymouth" is an alias for "null" which is basically
626 "true" (which thie above list doesn't have). Things like buildEnv and
627 loadDrivers are bespoke Red Hat behavior that might as well be hardwired in
628 to nash's main() without being called.</p>
630 <p>Instead of eliminating items
631 from the list with an explanation for each, I'm just going to cherry pick
632 a few: the device mapper (dm, raidautorun) is probably interesting,
633 hotplug (may be obsolete due to kernel changes that now load firmware
634 directly), and another "resume" ala klibc.</p>
636 <p>But mostly: I don't care about this one. And neither does Red Hat anymore.</p>
638 <p>Verdict: ignore</p>
641 <a name=beastiebox />
644 <p>Back in 2008, the BSD guys vented some busybox-envy
645 <a href=http://beastiebox.sourceforge.net>on sourceforge</a>. Then stopped.
646 Their repository is still in CVS, hasn't been touched in years, it's a giant
647 hairball of existing code sucked together. (The web page says the author
648 is aware of crunchgen, but decided to do this by hand anyway. This is not
649 a collection of new code, it's a katamari of existing code rolled up in a
652 <p>Combining the set of commands listed on the web page with the set of
653 man pages in the source gives us:</P>
656 [ cat chmod cp csh date df disklabel dmesg echo ex fdisk fsck fsck_ffs getty
657 halt hostname ifconfig init kill less lesskey ln login ls lv mksh more mount
658 mount_ffs mv pfctl ping poweroff ps reboot rm route sed sh stty sysctl tar test
659 traceroute umount vi wiconfig
662 <p>Apparently lv is the missing link ed and vi, copyright 1982-1997 (do not
663 want), ex is another obsolete vi mode, lesskey is "used to
664 specify a set of key bindings to be used with less", and csh is a shell they
665 sucked in, [ is an alias for test. Several more bsd-isms that don't have Linux
666 equivalents (even in the ubuntu "install this package" search) are
667 disklabel, fsck_ffs, mount_ffs, and pfctl. And wiconfig is a wavelan interface
668 network card driver utility. Subtracting all that and the commands toybox
669 already implements at triage time, we get:</p>
672 <span id=beastiebox_cmd>
673 fdisk fsck getty halt ifconfig init kill less mksh more mount mv ping poweroff
674 ps reboot route sed sh stty sysctl tar test traceroute umount vi
678 <p>Not a hugely interesting list, but eh.</p>
680 <p>Verdict: ignore</p>
686 <p>Somebody decided to do a <a href=https://wiki.freebsd.org/AdrianChadd/BsdBox>multicall binary for freebsd</a>.</p>
688 <p>They based it on crunchgen, a tool that glues existing programs together
689 into an archive and uses the name to execute the right one. It has no
690 simplification or code sharing benefits whatsoever, it's basically an
691 archiver that produces executables.</p>
693 <p>That's about where I stopped reading.</p>
695 <p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
699 <h2>OpenSolaris Busybox</h2>
701 <p>Somebody <a href=http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+busybox/>wrote
702 a wiki page</a> saying that Busybox for OpenSolaris would be a good idea.</p>
704 <p>The corresponding "files" tab is an auto-generated stub. The project never
705 even got as far as suggesting commands to include before Oracle discontinued
708 <p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
713 <p>The following additional commands have been requested (and often submitted)
714 by various users:</p>
717 dig freeramdisk getty halt hexdump hwclock klogd modprobe ping ping6 pivot_root
718 poweroff readahead rev sfdisk sudo syslogd taskset telnet telnetd tracepath
719 traceroute unzip usleep vconfig zip free login modinfo unshare netcat help w
720 ntpd iwconfig iwlist rdate
721 dos2unix unix2dos catv clear
722 pmap realpath setsid timeout truncate
723 mkswap swapon swapoff
725 acpi blkid eject pwdx
726 sulogin rfkill bootchartd
727 arp makedevs sysctl killall5 crond crontab deluser last mkpasswd watch
728 ipaddr iplink iproute blockdev rpm2cpio arping brctl dumpleases fsck
730 factor fallocate fsfreeze inotifyd lspci nbd-client partprobe strings
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