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1<html><head><title>toybox roadmap</title>
2<!--#include file="header.html" -->
3<title>Toybox Roadmap</title>
4
5<h2>Roadmap sections</h2>
6
7<ul>
8<li><a href=#goals>Introduction</a></li>
9<li><a href=#susv4>POSIX-2008/SUSv4</a></li>
10<li><a href=#sigh>Linux "Standard" Base</a></li>
11<li><a href=#rfc>IETF RFCs and Man Pages</a></li>
12<li><a href=#dev_env>Development Environment</a></li>
13<li><a href=#android>Android Toolbox</a></li>
14<li><a href=#aosp>Building AOSP</a></li>
15<li><a href=#tizen>Tizen Core</a></li>
16<li><a href=#yocto>Yocto</a></li>
17<li><a href=#fhs>Filesystem Hierachy Standard</a></li>
18<li><a href=#buildroot>buildroot</a></li>
19<li>Miscelaneous: <a href=#klibc>klibc</a>, <a href=#glibc>glibc</a>,
20<a href=#sash>sash</a>, <a href=#sbase>sbase</a>,
21<a href=#uclinux>uclinux</a>...</li>
22<li><a href=#packages>Other Packages</a></li>
23<li><a href=#todo>TODO list</a></li>
24</ul>
25
26<a name="goals" />
27<h2>Introduction (Goals and use cases)</h2>
28
29<p>We have several potential use cases for a new set of command line
30utilities, and are using those to determine which commands to implement
31for Toybox's 1.0 release. Most of these have their own section in the
32<a href=status.html>status page</a>, showing current progress towards
33commplation.</p>
34
35<p>The most interesting publicly available standards are A) POSIX-2008 (also
36known as SUSv4), B) the Linux Standard Base version 4.1, and C) the official
37<a href=https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/>Linux man pages</a>.
38But each of those include commands we've decided not implement, exclude
39commands or features we have, and don't always entirely match reality.</p>
40
41<p>The most thorough real world test (other than a large interactive
42userbase) is using toybox as the command line in a build system such as
43<a href=https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal
44Linux</a>, having it rebuild itself from source code, and using the result
45to <a href=https://github.com/landley/control-images>build Linux From Scratch</a>.
46The current "minimal native development system" goal is to use
47<a href=faq.html#mkroot>mkroot</a>
48plus <a href=faq.html#cross>musl-cross-make</a> to hermetically build
49<a href=https://source.android.com>AOSP</a>.</p>
50
51<p>We've also checked what commands were provided by similar projects
52(klibc, sash, sbase, embutils, nash, beastiebox...), looked at various
53vendor configurations of busybox, and collected end user requests.</p>
54
55<p>Finally, we'd like to provide a good replacement for the Bash shell,
56which was the first program Linux ever ran (leading up to the 0.0.1 release
57in 1991) and remains the standard shell of Linux (no matter what Ubuntu says).
58This doesn't necessarily mean including every last Bash 5.x feature, but
59does involve {various,features} &lt(beyond) posix.</p>
60
61<p>See the <a href=status.html>status page</a> for the categorized command list
62and progress towards implementing it.</p>
63
64<hr />
65<a name="standards">
66<h2>Use case: standards compliance.</h2>
67
68<h3><a name=susv4 /><a href="#susv4">POSIX-2008/SUSv4</a></h3>
69<p>The best standards describe reality rather than attempting to impose a
70new one. I.E. "A good standard should document, not legislate."
71Standards which document existing reality tend to be approved by
72more than one standards body, such as ANSI and ISO both approving <a href=https://landley.net/c99-draft.html>C99</a>. That's why IEEE 1003.1-2008,
73the Single Unix Specification version 4, and the Open Group Base Specification
74edition 7 are all the same standard from three sources, which most people just
75call "posix" (short for "portable operating system that works like unix").
76It's available <a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>online in full</a>, and may be downloaded as a tarball.
77Previous versions (<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/>SUSv3</a> and
78<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7990989775/>SUSv2</a>)
79are also available.</p>
80
81<p>The original Posix was a collection of different standards (POSIX.1
82from 1988, POSIX.1b from 1993, and POSIX.1c from 1995). The unified
83SUSv2 came out in 1997 and SUSv3 came out in 2001.
84<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition/>Posix
852008</a> was then reissued in 2013 and 2018, the first was minor wordsmithing
86with no behavioral changes, the second was to renew a ten year timeout
87to still be considered a "current standard" by some government regulations,
88but isn't officially a new standard. It's still posix-2008/SUSv4/Issue 7.
89The endless committee process to produce
90"Issue 8" has been ongoing for over 15 years now, with conference
91calls on mondays and thursdays, mostly to discuss recent bug tracker
92entries then publish the minutes of the meeting on the mailing list.
93Prominent committee members have died during this time.</p>
94
95<h3>Why not just use posix for everything?</h3>
96
97<p>Unfortunately, Posix describes an incomplete subset of reality, because
98it was designed to. It started with proprietary unix vendors collaborating to
99describe the functionality their fragmented APIs could agree on, which was then
100incorporated into <a href=https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub151-2-1993.pdf>US federal procurement standards</a>
101as a <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI>compliance requirement</a>
102for things like navy contracts, giving large corporations
103like IBM and Microsoft millions of dollars of incentive
104to punch holes in the standard big enough to drive
105<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem>Windows NT</a> and
106<a href=http://www.naspa.net/magazine/1996/May/T9605006.PDF>OS/360</a> through.
107When open source projects like Linux started developing on the internet
108(enabled by the 1993 relaxation of the National Science Foundation's
109"Acceptable Use Policy" allowing everyone to connect to the internet,
110previously restricted to approved government/military/university organizations),
111Posix <a href=http://www.opengroup.org/testing/fips/policy_info.html>ignored
112the upstarts</a> and Linux eventually
113<a href=https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3417>returned the favor</a>,
114leaving Posix behind.</p>
115
116<p>The result is a "standard" that lacks any mention of commands like
117"init" or "mount" required to actually boot a system.
118It describes logname but not login. It provides ipcrm
119and ipcs, but not ipcmk, so you can use System V IPC resources but not create
120them. And widely used real-world commands such as tar and cpio (the basis
121of initramfs and RPM) which were present in earlier
122versions of the standard have been removed, while obsolete commands like
123cksum, compress, sccs and uucp remain with no mention of modern counterparts
124like crc32/sha1sum, gzip/xz, svn/git or scp/rsync. Meanwhile posix' description
125of the commands
126themselves are missing dozens of features, and specify silly things like ebcdic
127support in dd or that wc should use %d (not %lld) for byte counts. So
128we have to extensively filter posix to get a useful set of recommendations.</p>
129
130<h3>Analysis</h3>
131
132<p>Starting with the
133<a href="http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition/idx/utilities.html">full "utilities" list</a>,
134we first remove generally obsolete
135commands (compress ed ex pr uncompress uccp uustat uux), commands for the
136pre-CVS "SCCS" source control system (admin delta get prs rmdel sact sccs unget
137val what), fortran support (asa fort77), and batch processing support (batch
138qalter qdel qhold qmove qmsg qrerun qrls qselect qsig qstat qsub).</p>
139
140<p>Some commands are for a compiler toolchain (ar c99 cflow ctags cxref gencat
141iconv lex m4 make nm strings strip yacc) which is out of scope for
142toybox and should be supplied externally. (Some of these might be
143revisited later, but not for toybox 1.0.)</p>
144
145<p>Some commands are part of a command shell, and can't be implemented as
146separate executables (alias bg cd command fc fg getopts hash jobs kill read
147type ulimit umask unalias wait). These may be implemented as part of the
148built-in toybox shell, but are not exported into $PATH via symlinks and
149thus are not part of toybox's main command list. (If you fork a
150child process and have it "cd" then exit, you've accomplished nothing.)
151Again, what posix lists as "commands" is incomplete: a shell also needs exit, if, while,
152for, case, export, set, unset, trap, exec... (And for bash compatibility
153function, source, declare...)</p>
154
155<p>A few other commands are judgement calls, providing command-line
156internationalization support (iconv locale localedef), System V inter-process
157communication (ipcrm ipcs), and cross-tty communication from the minicomputer
158days (talk mesg write). The "pax" utility <a href=https://slashdot.org/story/06/09/04/1335226/debian-kicks-jrg-schilling>failed</a> to replace tar,
159"mailx" is
160a command line email client, and "lp" submits files for printing to... what
161exactly? (cups?) The standard defines crontab but not crond. What is
162pathchk supposed to be portable _to_? (Linux accepts 255 byte path components
163with any char except NUL or / and no max length on the total path, and
164<a href=https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html>EXPLICITLY</a>
165doesn't care if it's an invalid utf8 sequence.)</p>
166
167<p>Removing all of that leaves the following commands, which toybox should
168implement:</p>
169
170<blockquote><b>
171<span id=posix>
172at awk basename bc cal cat chgrp chmod chown cksum cmp comm cp
173csplit cut date dd df diff dirname du echo env expand expr false file find
174fold fuser getconf grep head id join kill link ln logger logname ls man
175mkdir mkfifo more mv newgrp nice nl nohup od paste patch printf ps
176pwd renice rm rmdir sed sh sleep sort split stty tabs tail tee test time
177touch tput tr true tsort tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode uuencode vi wc
178who xargs zcat
179</span>
180</b></blockquote>
181
182<h3><a name=sigh /><a href="#sigh">Linux Standard Base</a></h3>
183
184<p>One attempt to supplement POSIX towards an actual usable system was the
185Linux Standard Base. Unfortunately, the quality of this "standard" is
186fairly low, largely due to the Free Standards Group that maintained it
187being consumed by <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#18-07-2010>the Linux Foundation</a> in 2007.</p>
188
189<p>Where POSIX allowed its standards process to be compromised
190by leaving things out (but what
191they DID standardize tends to be respected, if sometimes obsolete),
192the Linux Standard Base's failure mode was different. They responded to
193pressure by including anything their members paid them enough to promote,
194such as allowing Red Hat to push
195RPM into the standard even though all sorts of distros (Debian, Slackware, Arch,
196Gentoo, Android, Alpine...) don't use it and never will. This means anything in the LSB is
197at best a suggestion: arbitrary portions of this standard are widely
198ignored.</p>
199
200<p>The <a href=https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/39546.html>community perception</a>
201seems to be that the Linux Standard Base is
202the best standard money can buy: the Linux Foundation is supported by
203financial donations from large companies and the LSB
204<a href=https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2016/apr/11/lf/>represents the interests
205of those donors</a> regardless of technical merit. (The Linux Foundation, which
206maintains the LSB, is NOT a 501c3. It's a 501c6, the
207same kind of legal entity as the Tobacco Institute and
208<a href=https://lwn.net/Articles/706585/>Microsoft's</a>
209old "<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Copy_That_Floppy>Don't Copy That Floppy</a>" campaign.) Debian officially
210<a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/658809>washed its hands of LSB</a> by
211refusing to adopt release 5.0 in 2015, and no longer even pretends to support
212it (which affects Debian derivatives like Ubuntu and Knoppix). Toybox has
213stayed on 4.1 for similar reasons.</p>
214
215<p>That said, Posix by itself isn't enough, and this is the next most
216comprehensive standards effort for Linux so far, so we salvage what we can.
217A lot of historical effort went into producing the standard before the
218Linux Foundation took over.</p>
219
220<h3>Analysis</h3>
221
222<p>LSB 4.1 specifies a <a href=http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/cmdbehav.html>list of command line
223utilities</a>:</p>
224
225<blockquote><b>
226ar at awk batch bc chfn chsh col cpio crontab df dmesg du echo egrep
227fgrep file fuser gettext grep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
228gunzip gzip hostname install install_initd ipcrm ipcs killall lpr ls
229lsb_release m4 md5sum mknod mktemp more mount msgfmt newgrp od passwd
230patch pidof remove_initd renice sed sendmail seq sh shutdown su sync
231tar umount useradd userdel usermod xargs zcat
232</b></blockquote>
233
234<p>Where posix specifies one of those commands, LSB's deltas tended to be
235accomodations for broken tool versions which ween't up to date with the
236standard 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>
237for examples.)</p>
238
239<p>Since we've already committed to using our own judgement to skip bits of
240POSIX, and LSB's "judgement" in this regard is purely bug workarounds to declare
241various legacy tool implementations "compliant", this means we're mostly
242interested in the set of LSB tools that aren't mentioned in posix.</p>
243
244<p>Of these, gettext and msgfmt are internationalization, install_initd and
245remove_initd weren't present even in Ubuntu 10.04, lpr is out of scope,
246lsb_release just reports information in /etc/os-release, and sendmail's
247turned into a pile of cryptographic verification and DNS shenanigans due
248to spammers.</p>
249
250<p>This leaves:</p>
251
252<blockquote><b>
253<span id=lsb>
254chfn chsh dmesg egrep fgrep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
255gunzip gzip hostname install killall md5sum
256mknod mktemp mount passwd pidof seq shutdown
257su sync tar umount useradd userdel usermod zcat
258</span>
259</b></blockquote>
260
261<h3><a name=rfc /><a href="#rfc">IETF RFCs and Man Pages</a></h3>
262
263<p>They're very nice, but there's thousands of them. The signal to noise
264ratio here is terrible.</p>
265
266<p>Discussion of standards wouldn't be complete without the Internet
267Engineering Task Force's "<a href=https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-index.txt>Request For Comments</a>" collection and Michael Kerrisk's
268<a href=https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/>Linux man-pages project</a>...
269except these aren't standards, they're collections of documentation with
270low barriers to inclusion. They're not saying "you should support
271X", they're saying "if you do, here's how".
272Thus neither really helps us select which commands to include.</p>
273
274<p>The man pages website includes the commands in git, yum, perf, postgres,
275flatpack... Great for examining the features of a command you've
276already decided to include, useless for deciding _what_ to include.</p>
277
278<p>The RFCs are more about protocols than commands. The noise level is
279extremely high: there's thousands of RFCs, many describing a proposed idea
280that never took off, and less than 1% of the resulting documents are
281currently relevant to toybox. The documents are numbered based on the
282order they were received, with no real attempt at coherently indexing
283the result. As with man pages they can be <a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0610.txt>long and complicated</a> or
284<a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951.txt>terse and impenetrable</a>,
285have developed a certain amount of <a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc8179.txt>bureaucracy</a> over the years, and often the easiest way to understand what
286they <a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4330.txt>document</a> is to find an <a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1769.txt>earlier version</a> to read first.
287(This is an example of the greybeard community problem, where all current
288documentation was written by people who don't remember NOT already knowing
289this stuff and the resources they originally learned from are long gone.)</p>
290
291<p>That said, RFC documents can be useful (especially for networking protocols)
292and the four URL templates the recommended starting files
293for new commands (hello.c and skeleton.c in the toys/example directory)
294provide point to example posix, lsb, man, and rfc pages online.</p>
295
296<hr />
297<a name="dev_env">
298<h2><a href="#dev_env">Use case: provide a self-hosting development environment</a></h2>
299
300<p>Once upon a time, the following commands were enough to build the <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> development
301environment, boot it to a shell prompt, and build <a href=http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/6.8/>Linux From Scratch 6.8</a> under it.</p>
302
303<blockquote><b>
304<span id=development>
305bzcat cat cp dirname echo env patch rmdir sha1sum sleep sort sync
306true uname wc which yes zcat
307awk basename chmod chown cmp cut date dd diff
308egrep expr fdisk find grep gzip head hostname id install ln ls
309mkdir mktemp mv od readlink rm sed sh tail tar touch tr uniq
310wget whoami xargs chgrp comm gunzip less logname split
311tee test time bunzip2 chgrp chroot comm cpio dmesg
312dnsdomainname ftpget ftpput gunzip ifconfig init
313logname losetup mdev mount mountpoint nc pgrep pkill
314pwd route split stat switch_root tac umount vi
315resize2fs tune2fs fsck.ext2 genext2fs mke2fs xzcat
316</span>
317</b></blockquote>
318
319<p>This use case includes running init scripts and other shell scripts, running
320configure, make, and install in each package, and providing basic command line
321facilities such as a text editor. (It does not include a compiler toolchain or
322C library, those are outside the scope of the toybox project, although mkroot
323has a <a href=https://landley.net/code/qcc>potential follow-up project</a>.
324For now we use distro toolchains,
325<a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a>,
326and the Android NDK for build testing.)
327That build system also installed bash 2.05b as #!/bin/sh and its scripts
328required bash extensions not present in shells such as busybox ash.
329To replace that, toysh needs to supply several bash extensions _and_ work
330when called under the name "bash".</p>
331
332<p>The above command list was collected using a command line recording wrapper
333(mkroot/record-commands and toys/example/logpath.c) which mkroot/mkroot.sh
334also uses to populate root/build/log/*-commands.txt. Try
335<b>awk '{print $1}' root/build/log/*-commands.txt | sort -u | grep -v musl | xargs</b>
336after building a mkroot target to see the list of commands called out
337of the $PATH during that build.</p>
338
339<h3>Stages and moving targets</h3>
340
341<p>The development environment use case has two stages, achieving:
3421) a bootable system that can rebuild itself from source, and 2)
343a build environment capable
344of bootstrapping up to arbitrary complexity (by building
345Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch under the resulting
346system, or the Android Open Source Project). To accomplish just the first
347goal (a minimal system that can rebuild _itself_ from source), the old
348build still needs the following busybox commands for which toybox does
349not yet supply adequate replacements:</p>
350
351<blockquote><b>
352awk diff expr fdisk gzip less route sh tr unxz vi xzcat
353</b></blockquote>
354
355<p>All of those except awk and less have partial implementations
356in "pending".</p>
357
358<p>In 2017 Aboriginal Linux development ended, replaced by a much simpler
359project ("mkroot") designed to use an existing cross+native toolchain (such as
360<a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a>
361or the Android NDK) instead of building its own cross and native compilers
362from source. In 2019 the still-incomplete
363mkroot was merged into toybox as the "make root" target (which runs
364mkroot/mkroot.sh). This is intended
365as a simpler way of providing essentially the same build environment, and doesn't
366significantly affect the rest of this analysis (although the "rebuild itself
367from source" test should now include building musl-cross-make under either
368mkroot or toybox's "make airlock" host environment).</p>
369
370<p>Building Linux From Scratch is not the same as building the
371<a href=https://source.android.com>Android Open Source Project</a>,
372but after toybox 1.0 we plan to try
373<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#hairball>modifying the AOSP build</a>
374to reduce dependencies. (It's fairly likely we'll have to add at least
375a read-only git utility so repo can download the build's source code,
376but that's actually <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-lGyn3PHP4>not
377that hard</a>. We'll probably also need our own "make" at some point after
3781.0, which is its own moving target thanks to cmake and ninja and so on.)
379The ongoing Android <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2018-January/009330.html>hermetic build</a> work is already advancing
380this goal.</p>
381
382<hr />
383<h2><a name=android /><a href="#android">Use case: Replacing Android Toolbox</a></h2>
384
385<p>Android has a policy against GPL in userspace, so even though BusyBox
386predates Android by many years, they couldn't use it. Instead they grabbed
387an old version of ash (later replaced by
388<a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a>)
389and implemented their own command line utility set
390called "toolbox" (which toybox has already mostly replaced).</p>
391
392<p>Toolbox doesn't have its own repository, instead it's part of Android's
393<a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core>system/core
394git repository</a>. Android's Native Development Kit (their standalone
395downloadable toolchain)  has its own
396<a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/Roadmap.md>roadmap</a>, and each version has
397<a href=https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/revision_history>release
398notes</a>.</p>
399
400<h3>Toolbox commands:</h3>
401
402<p>According to <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/toolbox/Android.bp>
403system/core/toolbox/Android.bp</a> the toolbox directory builds the
404following commands:</p>
405
406<blockquote><b>
407getevent getprop modprobe setprop start
408</b></blockquote>
409
410<p>getprop/setprop/start were in toybox and moved back because they're so
411tied to non-public system interfaces. modprobe shares the implementation
412used in init. getevent is a board bringup tool built with a python script
413that pulls all the constants from the latest kernel headers.</p>
414
415<h3>Other Android /system/bin commands</h3>
416
417<p>Other than the toolbox links, the currently interesting
418binaries in /system/bin are:</p>
419
420<ul>
421<li><b>arping</b> - ARP REQUEST tool (iputils)</li>
422<li><b>blkid</b> - identify block devices (e2fsprogs)</li>
423<li><b>e2fsck</b> - fsck for ext2/ext3/ext4 (e2fsprogs)</li>
424<li><b>fsck.f2fs</b> - fsck for f2fs (f2fs-tools)</li>
425<li><b>fsck_msdos</b> - fsck for FAT (BSD)</li>
426<li><b>gzip</b> - compression/decompression tool (zlib)</li>
427<li><b>ip</b> - network routing tool (iproute2)</li>
428<li><b>iptables/ip6tables</b> - IPv4/IPv6 NAT admin (iptables)</li>
429<li><b>iw</b> - wireless device config tool (iw)</li>
430<li><b>logwrapper</b> - redirect stdio to android log (Android)</li>
431<li><b>make_ext4fs</b> - make ext4 fs (Android)</li>
432<li><b>make_f2fs</b> - make f2fs fs (f2fs-tools)</li>
433<li><b>ping/ping6</b> - ICMP ECHO_REQUEST tool (iputils)</li>
434<li><b>reboot</b> - reboot (Android)</li>
435<li><b>resize2fs</b> - resize ext2/ext3/ext4 fs (e2fsprogs)</li>
436<li><b>sh</b> - mksh (BSD)</li>
437<li><b>ss</b> - socket statistics (iproute2)</li>
438<li><b>tc</b> - traffic control (iproute2)</li>
439<li><b>tracepath/tracepath6</b> - trace network path (iputils)</li>
440<li><b>traceroute/traceroute6</b> - trace network route (iputils)</li>
441</ul>
442
443<p>The names in parentheses are the upstream source of the command.</p>
444
445<h3>Analysis</h3>
446
447<p>For reference, combining everything listed above that's still "fair game"
448for toybox, we get:</p>
449
450<blockquote><b>
451arping blkid e2fsck dd fsck.f2fs fsck_msdos gzip ip iptables
452ip6tables iw logwrapper make_ext4fs make_f2fs modpobe newfs_msdos ping ping6
453reboot resize2fs sh ss tc tracepath tracepath6 traceroute traceroute6
454</b></blockquote>
455
456<p>We may eventually implement all of that, but for toybox 1.0 we need to
457focus a bit. If Android has an acceptable external package, and the command
458isn't needed for system bootstrapping, replacing the external package is
459not a priority.</p>
460
461<p>However, several commands toybox plans to implement anyway could potentially
462replace existing Android versions, so we should take into account Android's use
463cases when doing so. This includes:</p>
464<blockquote><b>
465<span id=toolbox>
466getevent gzip modprobe newfs_msdos sh
467</span>
468</b></blockquote>
469
470<p>Update: <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/system/core/Android.bp>
471external/toybox/Android.bp</a> has symlinks for the following toys out
472of "pending". (The toybox modprobe is also built for the device, but
473it isn't actually used and is only there for sanity checking against
474the libmodprobe-based implementation.) These should be a priority for
475cleanup:</p>
476
477<blockquote><b>
478diff expr getopt tr brctl getfattr lsof modprobe more stty traceroute vi
479</b></blockquote>
480
481<p>Android wishlist:</p>
482
483<blockquote><b>
484mtools genvfatfs mke2fs gene2fs
485</b></blockquote>
486
487<hr />
488<h2><a name=aosp /><a href="#aosp">Use case: Building AOSP</a></h2>
489
490<p>The list of external tools used to build AOSP was
491<a href="https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/soong/+/master/ui/build/paths/config.go">here</a>,
492but as they're switched over to toybox they disappear and reappear
493<a href="https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/build-tools/+/refs/heads/master/path/linux-x86/">here</a>.</p>
494
495<blockquote><b>
496awk basename bash bc bzip2 cat chmod cmp comm cp cut date dd diff dirname dlv du
497echo egrep env expr find fuser getconf getopt git grep gzip head hexdump
498hostname id jar java javap ln ls lsof m4 make md5sum mkdir mktemp mv od openssl
499paste patch pgrep pkill ps pstree pwd python python2.7 python3 readlink
500realpath rm rmdir rsync sed setsid sh sha1sum sha256sum sha512sum
501sleep sort stat tar tail tee touch tr true uname uniq unix2dos unzip
502wc which whoami xargs xxd xz zip zipinfo
503</b></blockquote>
504
505<p>The following are already in the tree and will be used directly:</p>
506
507<blockquote><b>
508awk bc bzip2 jar java javap m4 make python python2.7 python3 xz
509</b></blockquote>
510
511<p>Subtracting what's already in toybox (including the following toybox toys
512that are still in pending: <code>diff expr gzip lsof tr</code>),
513that leaves:</p>
514
515<blockquote><b>
516bash fuser git hexdump openssl pstree rsync sh unzip zip zipinfo
517</b></blockquote>
518
519<p>For AOSP, zip/zipinfo/unzip are likely to be libziparchive based.
520git/openssl seem like they should just be brought in to the tree. rsync is
521used to work around a Mac <code>cp -Rf</code> bug with broken symbolic links.
522That leaves:</p>
523
524<blockquote><b>
525bash fuser hexdump pstree
526</b></blockquote>
527
528<p>(Why are fuser and pstree used during the AOSP build? They're used for
529diagnostics if something goes wrong. So it's really just bash and hexdump
530that are actually used to build.)</p>
531
532<hr />
533<h2><a name=tizen /><a href="#tizen">Use case: Tizen Core</a></h2>
534
535<p>A side effect of the Linux Foundation following the money to the
536exclusion of all else is they "support" their donors' myriad often
537contradictory pet projects with elaborate announcements and press releases.
538Long ago when Nokia's Maemo merged
539with Intel's Moblin to form <a href=https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/linux-foundation-to-host-meego-project/>MeeGo</a>, there were believable <a href=https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/public-support-for-the-meego-project/>statements</a>
540about unifying fragmented vendor efforts. Then MeeGo merged with
541<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMo_Foundation>LiMo</a> to
542<a href=notes-2012.html#16-05-2012>form Tizen</a>,
543which became a Samsung-only project (that <a href=https://www.androidheadlines.com/2021/05/samsung-tvs-continue-use-tizen-os.html>still ships</a>
544inside <a href=https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1453747613686288385>televisions</a>,
545but was otherwise subsumed into <a href=https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/18/22440483/samsung-smartwatch-google-wearos-tizen-watch>Android GO</a>).</p>
546
547<p>Along the way, the Tizen project expressed a desire to eliminate GPLv3 software
548from its core system, and in installing toybox as
549<a href=https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Toybox>part of this process</a>.</p>
550
551<p>They had a fairly long list of new commands they wanted to see in toybox:</p>
552
553<blockquote><b>
554<span id=tizen_cmd>
555arch base64 users unexpand shred join csplit
556hostid nproc runcon sha224sum sha256sum sha384sum sha512sum sha3sum mkfs.vfat fsck.vfat
557dosfslabel uname pinky diff3 sdiff zcmp zdiff zegrep zfgrep zless zmore
558</span>
559</b></blockquote>
560
561<p>In addition, they wanted to use several commands then in pending:</p>
562
563<blockquote><b>
564<span id=tizen>
565tar diff printf wget rsync fdisk vi less tr test stty fold expr dd
566</span>
567</b></blockquote>
568
569<p>Also, tizen uses a different Linux Security Module called SMACK, so
570many of the SELinux options ala ls -Z needed smack alternatives in an
571if/else setup. We added lib/lsm.h to abstract this, but haven't heard
572from Tizen in years and have started implementing SELinux support without
573Smack support in places like tar.c. At some point, lib/lsm.h may go away
574due to lack of expressed interest.</p>
575
576<hr />
577<h2><a name=yocto /><a href="#yocto">Use case: Yocto</a></h2>
578
579<p>Another project the Linux Foundation is paid to appreciate is Yocto,
580which was designed to fix the ongoing proprietary fragmentation problem
581(now in Linux build systems instead of vendor unix forks) by being the
582build system equivalent of a glue trap. While proclaiming that having the
583"minimum level of standardization" contributes to a "strong ecosystem",
584Yocto uses a "<a href=https://www.yoctoproject.org/software-overview/layers/>layered</a>"
585design where everybody who touches it is encouraged to add more and more layers
586of metadata on top of what came before, until they wind up <a href=https://github.com/varigit/variscite-bsp-platform>using repo</a> just to manage
587the layers (let alone their contents). But -- and this is the
588important bit -- all these dispirate forks are called "yocto" and built on
589top of giant piles of code the Linux Foundation can take credit for
590since they filed the serial numbers off OpenEmbedded. (And THEN users
591are encouraged to check the result into their own repository as one
592big initial commit, discarding all layers and history.)</p>
593
594<p>Yocto's "core-image-minimal" target (only 3,106 build steps in the 3.3
595release, which includes building host versions of gnome packages and
596<a href=https://landley.net/notes-2019.html#06-02-2019>something called</a>
597the "uninative binary shim") builds a busybox-based system with the following commands:</p>
598
599<blockquote><b>
600<span id=yocto_cmd>
601addgroup adduser ascii sh awk base32 basename blkid bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 cat
602chattr chgrp chmod chown chroot chvt clear cmp cp cpio crc32 cut date dc dd
603deallocvt delgroup deluser depmod df diff dirname dmesg dnsdomainname du
604dumpkmap dumpleases echo egrep env expr false fbset fdisk fgrep find flock
605free fsck fstrim fuser getopt getty grep groups gunzip gzip head hexdump
606hostname hwclock id ifconfig ifdown ifup insmod ip kill killall klogd less
607ln loadfont loadkmap logger logname logread losetup ls lsmod lzcat md5sum
608mesg microcom mkdir mkfifo mknod mkswap mktemp modprobe more mount mountpoint
609mv nc netstat nohup nproc nslookup od openvt patch pgrep pidof pivot_root
610printf ps pwd rdate readlink realpath reboot renice reset resize rev rfkill
611rm rmdir rmmod route run-parts sed seq setconsole setsid sh sha1sum sha256sum
612shuf sleep sort start-stop-daemon stat strings stty sulogin swapoff swapon
613switch_root sync sysctl syslogd tail tar tee telnet test tftp time top touch
614tr true ts tty udhcpc udhcpd umount uname uniq unlink unzip uptime users
615usleep vi watch wc wget which who whoami xargs xzcat yes zcat
616</span>
617</b></blockquote>
618
619<p>Nobody seems entirely sure why.</p>
620
621<a name="fhs" />
622<hr /><a href=fhs>Filesystem Hierachy Standard</a>
623<h2>Filesystem Hierarchy Standard:</h2>
624
625<p>Another standard taken over by the Linux Foundation. (At least the
626links to this one didn't <a href=http://lanana.org/>go 404</a> the
627instant they took it over). Of historical interest due to what it
628managed to achieve before they chased away the hobbyists maintaining it.
629Only one version (3.0 in 2015) has been released since the Linux Foundation
630absorbed the FHS. The previous release, Version 2.3, was released in 2004.
631The Linux Foundation did not retain earlier versions. The contents of
632the relevant sections appear identical between the two versions, in the
63311 years between releases the Linux Foundation just added section numbers.</p>
634
635<p><a href=https://refspects.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs-3.0.html>FHS 3.0</a>
636section 3.4.2 requires commands to be in the /bin directory, and then 3.4.3
637has an optional list,
638and then 3.16.2 and 3.16.3 similarly cover /sbin. There are linux
639specific sections in 6.1.2 and 6.1.6 but everything in them is obsolete.</p>
640
641<p>The /bin options include csh but not bash, and ed but not vi.
642The /sbin options have "update" which seems obsolete (filesystem
643buffers haven't needed a userspace process to flush them for DECADES),
644"fastboot" and "fasthalt" (reboot and halt have -nf), and
645fsck.* and mkfs.* that don't actually specify any specific filesystems.
646Removing that gives us:</p>
647
648<blockquote><b>
649<span id=fhs_cmd>
650cat chgrp chmod chown cp date dd df dmesg echo false hostname kill ln
651login ls mkdir mknod more mount mv ps pwd rm rmdir sed sh stty su sync true
652umount uname tar cpio gzip gunzip zcat netstat ping
653shutdown fdisk getty halt ifconfig init mkswap reboot route swapon swapoff
654</span>
655</b></blockquote>
656
657<hr /><a name=buildroot />
658<h2>buildroot:</h2>
659
660<p>If a toybox-based development environment is to support running
661buildroot under it, the <a href=https://buildroot.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#requirement-mandatory>mandatory packages</a>
662section of the buildroot manual lists:</p>
663
664<blockquote><p><b>
665which sed make bash patch gzip bzip2 tar cpio unzip rsync file bc wget
666</b></p></blockquote>
667
668<p>(It also lists binutils gcc g++ perl python, and for debian it wants
669the build-essential meta-package. And it wants file to be in /usr/bin because
670<a href=https://git.busybox.net/buildroot/tree/support/dependencies/dependencies.sh?h=2018.02.x#n84>libtool
671breaks otherwise</a>.)</p>
672
673<p>Oddly, buildroot can't NOT cross compile. Buildroot does not support a cross toolchain that lives in "/usr/bin"
674with a prefix of "".  If you try, and chop out the test for a blank prefix,
675it dies trying to run "/usr/bin/-gcc". In theory you can modify any open source
676project to do anything if you rewrite enough of it, but buildroot's developers
677explicitly do not support this usage model.</p>
678
679<hr /><a name=klibc />
680<h2>klibc:</h2>
681
682<p>Long ago some kernel developers came up with a project called
683<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klibc>klibc</a>.
684After a decade of development it still has no web page or HOWTO,
685and nobody's quite sure if the license is BSD or GPL. It inexplicably
686<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
687replacement.</p>
688
689<p>In addition to a C library less general-purpose than old versions of bionic
690(let alone musl), klibc builds a random assortment of executables to run init scripts
691with. There's no multiplexer command, these are individual executables:</p>
692
693<blockquote><p><b>
694cat chroot cpio dd dmesg false fixdep fstype gunzip gzip halt ipconfig kill
695kinit ln losetup ls minips mkdir mkfifo mknodes
696mksyntax mount mv nfsmount nuke pivot_root poweroff readlink reboot resume
697run-init sh sha1hash sleep sync true umount uname zcat
698</b></p></blockquote>
699
700<p>To get that list, build klibc according to the instructions (I
701<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#23-01-2013>looked at</a> version
7022.0.2 and did cd klibc-*; ln -s /output/of/kernel/make/headers_install
703linux; make) then <b>echo $(for i in $(find . -type f); do file $i | grep -q
704executable && basename $i; done | grep -v '[.]g$' | sort -u)</b> to find
705executables, then eliminate the *.so files and *.shared duplicates.</p>
706
707<p>Some of those binaries are build-time tools that don't get installed,
708which removes mknodes, mksyntax, sha1hash, and fixdep from the list.
709(And sha1hash is just an unpolished sha1sum anyway.)</p>
710
711<p>The run-init command is more commonly called switch_root, nuke is just
712"rm -rf -- $@", and minips is more commonly called "ps": I'm not doing aliases
713for these oddball names.
714The "kinit" command is another gratuitous rename, it's init running as PID 1.
715The halt, poweroff, and reboot commands work with it.
716Yet more stale forks of dash and gzip got sucked in here (see "dubious
717license terms" above).</p>
718
719<p>In theory "blkid" or "file" handle fstype (and df for mounted filesystems),
720but we could do fstype. We should also implement nfsmount, and probably smbmount
721and p9mount even though this hasn't got one. (The reason these aren't
722in the base "mount" command is they interactively query login credentials.)
723The ipconfig command here has a built in dhcp client, so it's ifconfig
724and dhcpcd and maybe some other stuff.</p>
725
726<p>The resume command is... weird. It finds a swap partition and reads data
727from it into a /proc file, something the kernel is capable of doing itself.
728(Even though the klibc author
729<a href=http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/klibc/2006-June/001748.html>attempted
730to remove</a> that capability from the kernel, current kernel/power/hibernate.c
731still parses "resume=" on the command line). And yet various distros seem to
732make use of klibc for this.
733Given the history of swsusp/hibernate (and
734<a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/333007>TuxOnIce</a>
735and <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/242107>kexec jump</a>...) I've lost track
736of the current state of the art here. Ah, Documentation/power/userland-swsusp.txt
737has the API docs, and <a href=http://suspend.sf.net>here's a better
738tool</a>...</p>
739
740<p>This gives us a klibc command list:</p>
741
742<blockquote><b>
743<span id=klibc_cmd>
744cat chroot dmesg false kill ln losetup ls mkdir mkfifo readlink rm switch_root
745sleep sync true uname
746
747cpio dd ps mv pivot_root
748mount nfsmount fstype umount
749sh gunzip gzip zcat
750kinit halt poweroff reboot
751ipconfig
752resume
753</span>
754</b></blockquote>
755
756<hr />
757<a name=glibc />
758<h2>glibc</h2>
759
760<p>Rather a lot of command line utilities come bundled with glibc:</p>
761
762<blockquote><b>
763catchsegv getconf getent iconv iconvconfig ldconfig ldd locale localedef
764mtrace nscd rpcent rpcinfo tzselect zdump zic
765</b></blockquote>
766
767<p>Of those, musl libc only implements ldd. Of the rest:</p>
768
769<ul>
770<li><b>catchsegv</b> is a rudimentary debugger, probably out of scope for toybox.</li>
771<li><b>iconv</b> has been <a href="#susv4">previously discussed</a>.</li>
772<li><b>iconvconfig</b> is only relevant if iconv is user-configurable; musl uses a
773non-configurable iconv now that utf8+unicode exist.</li>
774<li><b>getconf</b> is a posix utility which displays several variables from
775unistd.h; it probably belongs in the development toolchain.</li>
776<li><b>getent</b> handles retrieving entries from passwd-style databases
777(in a rather lame way) and is trivially replacable by grep.</li>
778<li><b>locale</b> was discussed under <a href=#susv4>posix</a>.</li>
779<li><b>localedef</b> compiles locale definitions, which musl currently does not use.</li>
780<li><b>mtrace</b> is a perl script to use the malloc debugging that glibc has built-in;
781this is not relevant for musl, and would necessarily vary with libc.</li>
782<li><b>nscd</b> is a name service caching daemon, which is not yet relevant for musl.</li>
783<li><b>rpcinfo</b> and <b>rpcent</b> are related to the Remote Procedure Calls
784layer (an old sun technology used by some userspace NFS implementations),
785which musl does not include and debian does not install by default.</li>
786</ul>
787
788<p>The remaining commands involve glibc's bundled timezone database,
789which seems to be derived from the <a href=http://www.iana.org/time-zones>IANA
790timezone database</a>. Unless we want to maintain our own fork of the
791standards body's database like glibc does, these are of no interest,
792but for completeness:</p>
793
794<ul>
795<li><b>tzselect</b> outputs a TZ variable correponding to user input.
796The documentation does not indicate how to use it in a script, but it seems
797that Debian may have done so.</li>
798<li><b>zdump</b> prints current time in each of several timezones, optionally
799outputting a great deal of extra information about each timezone.</li>
800<li><b>zic</b> converts a description of a timezone to a file in tz format.</li>
801</ul>
802
803<p>We implemented getconf and iconv, and I could see maybe arguing for ncsd.
804The rest are not relevant to toybox.</p>
805
806</b></blockquote>
807
808<hr />
809<a name=sash />
810<h2>Stand-Alone Shell</h2>
811
812<p>Wikipedia has <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-alone_shell>a good
813summary of sash</a>, with links. The original Stand-Alone Shell project reached
814a stopping point, and then <a href=http://www.baiti.net/sash>"sash plus
815patches"</a> extended it a bit further. The result is a megabyte executable
816that provides 40 commands.</p>
817
818<p>Sash is a shell with built-in commands. It doesn't have a multiplexer
819command, meaning "sash ls -l" doesn't work (you have to go "sash -c 'ls -l'").
820</p>
821
822<p>The list of commands can be obtained via building it and doing
823"echo help | ./sash | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/^-//' | xargs echo", which
824gives us:</p>
825
826<blockquote><b>
827alias aliasall ar cd chattr chgrp chmod chown cmp cp chroot dd echo ed exec
828exit file find grep gunzip gzip help kill losetup losetup ln ls lsattr mkdir
829mknod more mount mv pivot_root printenv prompt pwd quit rm rmdir setenv source
830sum sync tar touch umask umount unalias where
831</b></blockquote>
832
833<p>Plus sh because it's a shell. A dozen or so commands can only sanely be
834implemented as shell builtins (alias aliasall cd exec exit prompt quit setenv
835source umask unalias), and where is an alias for which.</p>
836
837<p>This leaves:</p>
838
839<blockquote><b>
840<span id=sash_cmd>
841chgrp chmod chown cmp cp chroot echo find grep help kill losetup
842ln ls mkdir mknod mount mv pivot_root printenv pwd rm rmdir sync tar touch umount
843ar chattr dd ed file gunzip gzip lsattr more sh
844</span>
845</b></blockquote>
846
847<p>(For once, this project doesn't include a fork of gzip, instead
848it sucks in -lz from the host.)</p>
849
850<hr />
851<a name=sbase />
852<h2>sbase:</h2>
853
854<p>It's <a href=http://git.suckless.org/sbase>on suckless</a> in
855<a href=http://git.suckless.org/ubase>two parts</a>. As of November 2015 it's
856implemented the following (renaming "cron" to "crond" for
857consistency, and yanking "sponge", "mesg", "pagesize", "respawn", and
858"vtallow"):</p>
859
860<blockquote><p>
861<span id=sbase_cmd>
862basename cal cat chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum cmp comm cp crond cut date
863dirname du echo env expand expr false find flock fold getconf grep head
864hostname join kill link ln logger logname ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mktemp mv
865nice nl nohup od paste printenv printf pwd readlink renice rm rmdir sed seq
866setsid sha1sum sha256sum sha512sum sleep sort split strings sync tail
867tar tee test tftp time touch tr true tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode
868uuencode wc which xargs yes
869</span>
870</p></blockquote>
871
872<p>and<p>
873
874<blockquote><p>
875<span id=sbase_cmd>
876chvt clear dd df dmesg eject fallocate free id login mknod mountpoint
877passwd pidof ps stat su truncate unshare uptime watch
878who
879</span>
880</p></blockquote>
881
882<hr />
883<a name=nash />
884<h2>nash:</h2>
885
886<p>Red Hat's nash was part of its "mkinitrd" package, replacement for a shell
887and utilities on the boot floppy back in the 1990's (the same general idea
888as BusyBox, developed independently). Red Hat discontinued nash development
889in 2010, replacing it with dracut (which collects together existing packages,
890including busybox).</p>
891
892<p>I couldn't figure out how to beat source code out of
893<a href=http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/git/mkinitrd>Fedora's current git</a>
894repository. The last release version that used it was Fedora Core 12
895which 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>
896that can be unwound with "rpm2cpio mkinitrd.src.rpm | cpio -i -d -H newc
897--no-absolute-filenames" and in there is a mkinitrd-6.0.93.tar.bz2 which
898has the source.</p>
899
900<p>In addition to being a bit like a command shell, the nash man page lists the
901following commands:</p>
902
903<blockquote><p>
904access echo find losetup mkdevices mkdir mknod mkdmnod mkrootdev mount
905pivot_root readlink raidautorun setquiet showlabels sleep switchroot umount
906</p></blockquote>
907
908<p>Oddly, the only occurrence of the string pivot_root in the nash source code
909is in the man page, the command isn't there. (It seems to have been removed
910when the underscoreless switchroot went in.)</p>
911
912<p>A more complete list seems to be the handlers[] array in nash.c:</p>
913
914<blockquote><p>
915access buildEnv cat cond cp daemonize dm echo exec exit find kernelopt
916loadDrivers loadpolicy mkchardevs mkblktab mkblkdevs mkdir mkdmnod mknod
917mkrootdev mount netname network null plymouth hotplug killplug losetup
918ln ls raidautorun readlink resume resolveDevice rmparts setDeviceEnv
919setquiet setuproot showelfinterp showlabels sleep stabilized status switchroot
920umount waitdev
921</p></blockquote>
922
923<p>This list is nuts: "plymouth" is an alias for "null" which is basically
924"true" (which the above list doesn't have). Things like buildEnv and
925loadDrivers are bespoke Red Hat behavior that might as well be hardwired in
926to nash's main() without being called.</p>
927
928<p>Instead of eliminating items
929from the list with an explanation for each, I'm just going to cherry pick
930a few: the device mapper (dm, raidautorun) is probably interesting,
931hotplug (may be obsolete due to kernel changes that now load firmware
932directly), and another "resume" ala klibc.</p>
933
934<p>But mostly: I don't care about this one. And neither does Red Hat anymore.</p>
935
936<p>Verdict: ignore</p>
937
938<hr />
939<a name=beastiebox />
940<h2>Beastiebox</h2>
941
942<p>Back in 2008, the BSD guys vented some busybox-envy
943<a href=http://beastiebox.sourceforge.net>on sourceforge</a>. Then stopped.
944Their repository is still in CVS, hasn't been touched in years, it's a giant
945hairball of existing code sucked together. (The web page says the author
946is aware of crunchgen, but decided to do this by hand anyway. This is not
947a collection of new code, it's a katamari of existing code rolled up in a
948ball.)</p>
949
950<p>Combining the set of commands listed on the web page with the set of
951man pages in the source gives us:</P>
952
953<blockquote><p>
954[ cat chmod cp csh date df disklabel dmesg echo ex fdisk fsck fsck_ffs getty
955halt hostname ifconfig init kill less lesskey ln login ls lv mksh more mount
956mount_ffs mv pfctl ping poweroff ps reboot rm route sed sh stty sysctl tar test
957traceroute umount vi wiconfig
958</p></blockquote>
959
960<p>Apparently lv is the missing link between ed and vi, copyright 1982-1997 (do
961not want), ex is another obsolete vi mode, lesskey is "used to
962specify a set of key bindings to be used with less", and csh is a shell they
963sucked in (even though they have mksh?), [ is an alias for test. Several more bsd-isms that don't have Linux
964equivalents (even in the ubuntu "install this package" search) are
965disklabel, fsck_ffs, mount_ffs, and pfctl. And wiconfig is a
966wavelan interface network card driver utility. Subtracting all that and the
967commands toybox already implements at triage time, we get:</p>
968
969<blockquote><p>
970<span id=beastiebox_cmd>
971fdisk fsck getty halt ifconfig init kill less more mount mv ping poweroff
972ps reboot route sed sh stty sysctl tar test traceroute umount vi
973</span>
974</p></blockquote>
975
976<p>Not a hugely interesting list, but eh.</p>
977
978<p>Verdict: ignore</p>
979
980<hr />
981<a name=BsdBox />
982<h2>BsdBox</h2>
983
984<p>Somebody decided to do a <a href=https://wiki.freebsd.org/AdrianChadd/BsdBox>multicall binary for freebsd</a>.</p>
985
986<p>They based it on crunchgen, a tool that glues existing programs together
987into an archive and uses the name to execute the right one. It has no
988simplification or code sharing benefits whatsoever, it's basically an
989archiver that produces executables.</p>
990
991<p>That's about where I stopped reading.</p>
992
993<p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
994
995<hr />
996<a name=slowaris />
997<h2>OpenSolaris Busybox</h2>
998
999<p>Somebody <a href=http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+busybox/>wrote
1000a wiki page</a> saying that Busybox for OpenSolaris would be a good idea.</p>
1001
1002<p>The corresponding "files" tab is an auto-generated stub. The project never
1003even got as far as suggesting commands to include before Oracle discontinued
1004OpenSolaris.</p>
1005
1006<p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
1007
1008<hr />
1009<a name=uclinux />
1010<h2>uClinux</h2>
1011
1012<p>Long ago a hardware developer named Jeff Dionne put together a
1013nommu Linux distribution, which involved rewriting a lot of command line
1014utilities that relied on <a href=http://nommu.org/memory-faq.txt>features
1015unavailable on nommu</a> hardware.</p>
1016
1017<p>In 2003 Jeff moved to Japan and handed
1018the project off to people who allowed it to roll to a stop. The website
1019turned into a mess of 404 links, the navigation indexes stopped being
1020updated over a decade ago, and the project's CVS repository suffered a
1021hard drive failure for which there were no backups. The project continued
1022to put out "releases" through 2014 (you have to scroll down in the "news"
1023section to find them, the "HTTP download" section in the nav bar on the
1024left hasn't been updated in over a decade), which were hand-updated tarball
1025snapshots mostly consisting of software from the 1990's. For example the
10262014 release still contained ipfwadm, the package which predated ipchains,
1027which predated iptables, which is in the process of being replaced by
1028nftables.</p>
1029
1030<p>Nevertheless, people still try to use this because the project was viewed
1031as the place to discuss, develop, and learn about nommu Linux.
1032The role of uclinux.org as an educational resource kept people coming
1033to it long after it had collapsed as a Linux distro.</p>
1034
1035<p>Starting around 0.6.0 toybox began to address nommu support with the goal
1036of putting uClinux out of its misery.</p>
1037
1038<p>An analysis of <a href=http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/dist/uClinux-dist-20140504.tar.bz2>uClinux-dist-20140504</a> found 312 package
1039subdirectories under "user".</p>
1040
1041<h3>Taking out the trash</h3>
1042
1043<p>A bunch of packages (<b>inotify-tools, input-event-demon, ipsec-tools, netifd,
1044keepalived, mobile-broadband-provider-info, nuttp, readline, snort,
1045snort-barnyard, socat, sqlite, sysklogd, sysstat, tcl, ubus, uci, udev,
1046unionfs, uqmi, usb_modeswitch, usbutils, util-linux</b>)
1047are hard to evaluate because
1048uclinux has directories for them, but their source isn't actually in the
1049uclinux tree. In some of these the makefiles download a git repo during
1050the build, so I'm assuming you can build the external package if you really
1051care. (Even when I know what these packages do, I'm skipping them
1052because uclinux doesn't actually contain them, and any given snapshot
1053of the build system will bitrot as external web links change over time.)</p>
1054
1055<p>Other packages are orphaned, meaning they're not mentioned from any Kconfig
1056or Makefiles outside of their directory, so uclinux can't actually build
1057them: <b>mbus</b> is an orphaned i2c test program expecting to run in some sort
1058of hardwired hardware context, <b>mkeccbin</b> is an orphaned "ECC annotated
1059binary file" generator (meaning it's half of a flash writer),
1060<b>wsc_upnp</b> is a "Ralink WPS" driver (some sort of stale wifi chip)...</p>
1061
1062<p>The majority of the remaining packages are probably not of interest to
1063toybox due to being so obsolete or special purpose they may not actually be
1064of interest to anybody anymore. (This list also includes a lot of
1065special-purpose network back-end stuff that's hard for anybody but
1066datacenter admins to evaluate the current relevance of.)</p>
1067
1068<blockquote><b><p>
1069arj asterisk boottools bpalogin br2684ctl camserv can4linux cgi_generic
1070cgihtml clamav clamsmtp conntrack-tools cramfs crypto-tools cxxtest
1071ddns3-client de2ts-cal debug demo diald discard dnsmasq dnsmasq2
1072ethattach expat-examples ez-ipupdate fakeidentd
1073fconfig ferret flatfs flthdr freeradius freeswan frob-led frox fswcert
1074game gettyd gnugk haserl horch
1075hostap hping httptunnel ifattach ipchains
1076ipfwadm ipmasqadm ipportfw ipredir ipset iso_client
1077jamvm jffs-tools jpegview jquery-ui kendin-config kismet klaxon kmod
1078l2tpd lcd ledcmd ledcon lha lilo lirc lissa load loattach
1079lpr lrpstat lrzsz mail mbus mgetty microwin ModemManager msntp musicbox
1080nooom null openswan openvpn palmbot pam_* pcmcia-cs playrt plugdaemon pop3proxy
1081potrace qspitest quagga radauth
1082ramimage readprofile rdate readprofile routed rrdtool rtc-ds1302
1083sendip ser sethdlc setmac setserial sgutool sigs siproxd slattach
1084smtpclient snmpd net-snmp snortrules speedtouch squashfs scep sslwrap stp
1085stunnel tcpblast tcpdump tcpwrappers threaddemos tinylogin tinyproxy
1086tpt tripwire unrar unzoo version vpnled w3cam xl2tpd zebra
1087</p></b></blockquote>
1088
1089<p>This stuff is all over the place: arj, lha, rar, and zoo are DOS archivers,
1090ethattach describes itself as just "a network tool",
1091mail is a textmode smtp mailer literally described as "Some kind of mail
1092proggy" in uclinux's kconfig (as opposed to clamsmtp and smtpclient and
1093so on), this gettyd isn't a generic version but specifically a
1094hardwired ppp dialin utility, mgetty isn't a generic version but is combined
1095with "sendfax", hostap is an intersil prism driver, wlan-ng is also an
1096intersil prism dirver, null is a program to intentionally dereference a
1097null pointer (in case you needed one), iso_client is a
1098"Demo Application for the USB Device Driver", kendin-config is
1099"for configuring the Micrel Kendin KS8995M over QSPI", speedtouch configures
1100a specific brand of asdl modem, portmap is part of Anfs,
1101ferret, linux-igd, and miniupnp are all upnp packages,
1102lanbypass "can be used to control the LAN
1103bypass switches on the Advantech x86 based hardware platforms", lcd is
1104"test of lcddma device driver" (an out-of-tree Coldfire driver apparently
1105lost to history, the uclinux linux-2.4.x directory has a config symbol for
1106it, but nothing in the code actually _uses_ it...), qspitest is another
1107coldfire thing, mii-tool-fec is
1108"strictly for the FEC Ethernet driver as implemented (and modified) for
1109the uCdimm5272", rtc-ds1302 and rtc-m41t11 are usermode drivers for specific
1110clock chips, stunnel is basically "openssl s_client -quiet -connect",
1111potrace is a bitmap to vector graphic converter, radauth performs command line
1112authentication against a radius server,
1113clamav, klaxon, ferret, l7-protocols, and nessus are very old network security
1114software (it's got a stale snapshot of nmap too), xl2tpd is a PPP over UDP
1115tunnel (rfc 2661), zebra is the package quagga replaced,
1116lilo is the x86-only bootloader that predated grub (and recently discontinued
1117development), lissa is a "framebuffer graphics demo" from
11181998, the squashfs package here is the out of tree patches for 2.4 kernels
1119and such before the filesystem was merged upstream (as opposed to the
1120squashfs-new package which is a snapshot of the userspace tool from 2011),
1121load is basically "dd file /dev/spi", version is basically "cat /proc/version",
1122microwin is a port of the WinCE graphics API to Linux, scep is a 2003
1123implementation of an IETF draft abandoned in 2010, tpt depends on
1124Andrew Morton's 15 year old unmerged "timepegs" kernel patch using the pentium
1125cycle counter, vpnled controls a light that reboots systems (what?),
1126w3cam is a video4linux 1.0 client (v4l2 showed up during 2.5 and support for
1127the old v4l1 was removed in 2.6.38 back in 2011), busybox ate tinylogin
1128over a decade ago, lrpstat is a java network monitor
1129from 2001, lrzsz is zmodem/ymodem/zmodem, msntp and stp implement rfc2030
1130meaning it overflows in 2036 (the package was last updated in 2000), rdate
1131is rfc 868 meaning it also overflows in 2036 (which is why ntp was invented
1132a few decades back), reiserfsprogs development stopped abruptly after
1133Hans Reiser was convicted of murdering his wife Nina (denying it on the
1134stand and then leading them to the body as part of his plea bargain during
1135sentencing)...
1136</p>
1137
1138<p>Seriously, there's a lot of crap in there. It's hard to analyze most
1139of it far enough to prove it _doesn't_ do anything.</p>
1140
1141<h3>Non-toybox programs</h3>
1142
1143<p>The following software may actually still do something intelligible
1144(although the package versions tend to be years out of date), but
1145it's not a direction toybox has chosen to go in.</p>
1146
1147<p>There are several programming languages (<b>bash, lua, jamvm, tinytcl,
1148perl, python</b>) in there. Maybe someone somewhere wants a 2008 release of a
1149java virtual machine tested to work on nommu systems (jamvm), but it's out
1150of scope for toybox.</p>
1151
1152<p>A bunch of benchmark programs: <b>cpu, dhrystone, mathtest, nbench, netperf,
1153netpipe, and whetstone</b>.</p>
1154
1155<p>A bunch of web servers: <b>appWeb, boa, fnord (via tcpserver), goahead, httpd,
1156mini_httpd, and thttpd</b>.</p>
1157
1158<p>A bunch of shells: <b>msh</b> is a clever (I.E. obfuscated) little shell,
1159<b>nwsh</b> is "new shell" (that's what it called itself in 1999 anyway),
1160<b>sash</b> is another shell with a bunch of builtins (ls, ps, df, cp, date, reboot,
1161and shutdown, this roadmap analyzes it <a href="#sash">elsewhere</a>),
1162<b>sh</b> is a very old minix shell fork, and <b>tcsh</b> is also a shell.</p>
1163
1164<p>Also in this category, we have:</p>
1165
1166<blockquote><b><p>
1167dropbear jffs-tools jpegview kexec-tools bind ctorrent
1168iperf iproute2 ip-sentinel iptables kexec
1169nmap oggplay openssl oprofile p7zip pppd pptp play vplay
1170hdparm mp3play at clock
1171mtd-utils mysql logrotate brcfg bridge-utils flashw
1172ebtables etherwake ethtool expect gdb gdbserver hostapd
1173lm_sensors load netflash netstat-nat
1174radvd recover rootloader resolveip rp-pppoe
1175rsyslog rsyslogd samba smbmount squashfs-new squid ssh strace tip
1176uboot-envtools ulogd usbhubctrl vconfig vixie-cron watchdogd
1177wireless_tools wpa_supplicant
1178</p></b></blockquote>
1179
1180<p>An awful lot of those are borderline: play and vplay are wav file
1181audio players, there's oprofile _and_ readprofile (which just reads kernel
1182profiling data from /proc/profile),
1183radvd is a "routr advertisement daemon" (ipv6 stateless autoconf),
1184ctorrent is a bittorent client,
1185lm_sensors is hardware (heat?) monitoring,
1186resolveip is dig only less so,
1187rp-pppoe is ppp over ethernet,
1188ebtables is an ethernet version of iptables (for bridging),
1189their dropbear is from 2012, and that ssh version is from 2011
1190(which means it's about nine months too _old_ to have the heartbleed bug).
1191There's both ulogd and ulogd2 (no idea why), and pppd is version 2.4 but
1192there's a ppd-2.3 directory also. We used to be interested in ftpd/proftpd
1193as a way of uploading files out of a vm, but support for that has waned
1194over the years and there are lots of alternatives.</p>
1195
1196<p>Lots of flash stuff:
1197flashw is a flash writer, load is an spi flash loader, netflash writes
1198to flash via tftp,
1199recover is also a reflash daemon intended to come up when the system can't boot,
1200rootloader seems to be another reflash daemon but without dhcp.</p>
1201
1202<h3>Already in roadmap</h3>
1203
1204<p>The following packages contain commands already in the toybox roadmap:</p>
1205
1206<blockquote><b><p>
1207agetty cal cksum cron dhcpcd dhcpcd-new dhcpd dhcp-isc dosfstools e2fsprogs
1208elvis-tiny levee fdisk fileutils ftp grep hd hwclock inetd init ntp
1209iputils login module-init-tools netcat shutils ntpdate lspci ping procps
1210rsync shadow shutils stty sysutils telnet telnetd tftp tftpd traceroute
1211unzip wget mawk net-tools
1212</p></b></blockquote>
1213
1214<p>There are some duplicates in there, levee is a tiny vi implementation
1215like elvis-tiny, ntp and ntpdate overlap, etc.</p>
1216
1217<p>Verdict: We don't really need to do a whole lot special for nommu
1218systems, just get the existing toybox roadmap working on nommu and
1219we're good. The uClinux project can rest in peace.</p>
1220
1221<hr />
1222<h2>Requests:</h2>
1223
1224<p>The following additional commands have been requested (and often submitted)
1225by various users. I _really_ need to clean up this section.</p>
1226
1227<p>Also:</p>
1228<blockquote><b>
1229<span id=request>
1230dig freeramdisk getty halt hexdump hwclock klogd modprobe ping ping6 pivot_root
1231poweroff readahead rev sfdisk sudo syslogd taskset telnet telnetd tracepath
1232traceroute unzip usleep vconfig zip free login modinfo unshare netcat help w
1233iwconfig iwlist rdate
1234dos2unix unix2dos clear
1235pmap realpath setsid timeout truncate
1236mkswap swapon swapoff
1237count oneit fstype
1238acpi blkid eject pwdx
1239sulogin rfkill bootchartd
1240arp makedevs sysctl killall5 crond crontab deluser last mkpasswd watch
1241blockdev rpm2cpio arping brctl dumpleases fsck
1242tcpsvd tftpd
1243factor fallocate fsfreeze inotifyd lspci nbd-client partprobe strings
1244base32 base64 mix
1245reset hexedit nsenter shred
1246fsync insmod ionice lsmod lsusb rmmod vmstat xxd top iotop
1247lsof ionice compress dhcp dhcpd addgroup delgroup host iconv ip
1248ipcrm ipcs netstat openvt
1249deallocvt iorenice
1250udpsvd adduser
1251microcom tunctl chrt getfattr setfattr
1252kexec
1253ascii crc32 devmem fmt i2cdetect i2cdump i2cget i2cset i2ctransfer mcookie prlimit sntp ulimit uuidgen dhcp6 ipaddr iplink iproute iprule iptunnel cd exit toysh bash traceroute6
1254blkdiscard rtcwake
1255watchdog
1256pwgen readelf unicode
1257rsync
1258linux32 hd strace
1259gpiodetect gpiofind gpioget gpioinfo gpioset httpd uclampset
1260nbd-server
1261</span>
1262</b></blockquote>
1263
1264<hr />
1265<a name=packages />
1266<h2>Other packages</h2>
1267
1268<p>System administrators have <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/168#issuecomment-583725500>asked</a> what other Linux packages toybox commands
1269replace, so they can annotate alternatives in their package management system.</p>
1270
1271<p>This section uses the package definitions from Chapter 6 of
1272<a href=http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/9.0/LFS-BOOK-9.0-NOCHUNKS.html>Linux From Scratch 9.0</a>). Each package lists what we currently
1273replace, pending commands [in square brackets], and what we DON'T plan to
1274implement.</p>
1275
1276<p>Each "see also" note means the listed package also installs the listed shared
1277libraries. (While toybox contains equivalent functionality to a lot of these
1278shared libraries in its lib/ directory, it does not currently provide a shared
1279library interface.)</p>
1280
1281<h3>Packages toybox plans to provide complete-ish replacements for:</h3>
1282<ul>
1283<li><b>file</b>: file (see also: libmagic)</li>
1284<li><b>m4</b>: [m4]</li>
1285<li><b>bc</b>: [bc] [dc]</li>
1286<li><b>bison</b>: [yacc] (not: bison, see also: liby)</li>
1287<li><b>flex</b>: [lex] (not: flex flex++, see also: libfl)</li>
1288<li><b>make</b>: [make]</li>
1289<li><b>sed</b>: sed</li>
1290<li><b>grep</b>: grep egrep fgrep</li>
1291<li><b>bash</b>: bash sh (not: bashbug)</li>
1292<li><b>diffutils</b>: cmp [diff] [diff3] [sdiff]</li>
1293<li><b>gawk</b>: [awk] (not: gawk gawk-5.0.1)</li>
1294<li><b>findutils</b>: find xargs (not: locate updatedb)</li>
1295<li><b>less</b>: less (not: lessecho lesskey)</li>
1296<li><b>gzip</b>: zcat [gzip] [gunzip] [zcmp] [zdiff] [zegrep] [zfgrep] [zgrep] [zless] [zmore]
1297(not: gzexe uncompress zforce znew)</li>
1298<li><b>patch</b>: patch</li>
1299<li><b>tar</b>: tar</li>
1300<li><b>procps-ng</b>: free pgrep pidof pkill ps sysctl top uptime vmstat w watch
1301[pmap] [pwdx] [slabtop]
1302(not: tload, see also libprocps)</li>
1303<li><b>sysklogd</b>: [klogd] [syslogd]</li>
1304<li><b>sysvinit</b>: [init] halt poweroff reboot killall5 [shutdown]
1305(not telinit runlevel fstab-decode bootlogd)</li>
1306<li><b>man</b>: man (but not accessdb apropos catman lexgrog mandb manpath whatis,
1307see also libman libmandb)</li>
1308<li><b>vim</b>: vi xxd (but not ex, rview, rvim, view, vim, vimdiff, vimtutor)</li>
1309<li><b>sysvinit</b>: [init] halt poweroff reboot killall5 [shutdown]
1310(not telinit runlevel fstab-decode bootlogd)</li>
1311<li><b>kmod</b>: insmod lsmod rmmod modinfo [modprobe]
1312(not: depmod kmod)</li>
1313<li><b>attr</b>: [getfattr] setfattr (not: attr, see also: libattr)</li>
1314<li><b>shadow</b>: [chfn] [chpasswd] [chsh] [groupadd] [groupdel] [groupmod]
1315[newusers] passwd [su] [useradd] [userdel] [usermod]
1316[lastlog] [login] [newgidmap] [newuidmap]
1317(not: chage expiry faillog groupmems grpck logoutd newgrp nologin pwck sg
1318vigr vipw, grpconv grpunconv pwconv pwunconv, chgpasswd gpasswd)</li>
1319<li><b>psmisc</b>: killall [fuser] [pstree] [peekfd] [prtstat]
1320(not: pslog pstree.x11)</li>
1321<li><b>inetutils</b>: dnsdomainname [ftp] hostname ifconfig ping ping6 [telnet] [tftp] [traceroute] (not: talk)</li>
1322<li><b>coreutils</b>: [ base32 base64 basename cat chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum comm cp cut date
1323dd df dirname du echo env expand factor false fmt fold groups head hostid id install
1324link ln logname ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod mktemp mv nice nl nohup nproc od
1325paste printenv printf pwd readlink realpath rm rmdir seq sha1sum shred
1326sleep sort split stat sync tac tail tee test timeout touch true truncate
1327tty uname uniq unlink wc who whoami yes
1328[expr] [fold] [join] [numfmt] [runcon] [sha224sum] [sha256sum] [sha384sum]
1329[sha512sum] [stty] [b2sum] [tr] [unexpand]
1330(not: basenc chcon csplit dir dircolors pathchk
1331pinky pr ptx shuf stdbuf sum tsort users vdir, see also libstdbuf)</li>
1332<li><b>util-linux</b>: blkid blockdev cal chrt dmesg eject fallocate flock hwclock
1333ionice kill logger losetup mcookie mkswap more mount mountpoint nsenter
1334pivot_root prlimit rename renice rev setsid swapoff swapon switch_root taskset
1335umount unshare uuidgen
1336[addpart] [fdisk] [findfs] [findmnt] [fsck] [fsfreeze] [fstrim] [getopt]
1337[hexdump] [linux32] [linux64] [lsblk] [lscpu] [lsns] [setarch]
1338(not: agetty blkdiscard blkzone cfdisk chcpu chmem choom col
1339colcrt colrm column ctrlaltdel delpart fdformat fincore fsck.cramfs
1340fsck.minix ipcmk ipcrm ipcs isosize last lastb ldattach look lsipc
1341lslocks lslogins lsmem mesg mkfs mkfs.bfs mkfs.cramfs mkfs.minix namei partx
1342raw readprofile resizepart rfkill rtcwake script scriptreplay
1343setterm sfdisk sulogin swaplabel ul
1344uname26 utmpdump uuidd uuidparse wall wdctl whereis wipefs
1345i386 x86_64 zramctl)</li>
1346</ul>
1347
1348<p>Commentary: toybox init doesn't do runlevels, man and vim are just the
1349relevant commands without the piles of strange overgrowth, and if you want
1350to call a toybox binary by another name you can create a symlink to a
1351symlink. If somebody really wants to argue for "gzexe" or similar, be
1352my guest, but there's a lot of obsolete crap in shadow, coreutils,
1353util-linux...</p>
1354
1355<p>No idea why LFS is installing inetutils instead of net-tools
1356(which contains arp route ifconfig mii-tool nameif netstat and rarp that
1357toybox does or might implement, and plipconfig slattach that it probably won't.)</p>
1358
1359<h3>Packages toybox plans to provide partial replacements for:</h3>
1360
1361<p>Toybox provides replacements for some binaries from these packages,
1362but there are other useful binaries which this package provides that toybox
1363currently considers out of scope for the project:</p>
1364
1365<ul>
1366<li><b>binutils</b>: strings [ar] [nm] [readelf] [size] [objcopy] [strip]
1367(not c++filt, dwp, elfedit, gprof. The following commands belong
1368in <a href=/code/qcc>qcc</a>: addr2line as ld objdump ranlib)</li>
1369<li><b>bzip2</b>: bunzip2 bzcat [bzcmp] [bzdiff] [bzegrep] [bzfgrep] [bzgrep] [bzless]
1370[bzmore] (not: bzip2, bzip2recover, see also libbz2)</li>
1371<li><b>xz</b>: [xzcat] [lzcat] [lzcmp] [lzdiff] [lzegrep] [lzfgrep] [lzgrep]
1372[lzless] [lzmadec, lzmainfo] [lzmore] [unlzma] [unxz] [xzcat]
1373[xzcmp] [xzdec] [xzdiff] [xzegrep] [xzfgrep] [xzgrep] [xzless] [xzmore]
1374(not: compression side, see also: liblzma)</li>
1375<li><b>ncurses</b>: clear reset (not: everything else, see also: libcurses)</li>
1376<li><b>e2fsprogs</b>: chattr lsattr [e2fsck] [mkfs.ext2] [mkfs.ext3]
1377[fsck.ext2] [fsck.ext3] [e2label] [resize2fs] [tune2fs]
1378(not badblocks compile_et debugfs dumpe2fse2freefrag e2image
1379e2mmpstatus e2scrub e2scrub_all e2undo e4crypt e4defrag filefrag
1380fsck.ext4 logsave mk_cmds mkfs.ext4 mklost+found)</li>
1381</ul>
1382
1383<p>Toybox provides several decompressors but compresses to a single format
1384(deflate, ala gzip/zlib). Our e2fsprogs doesn't currently plan to support
1385ext4 or defrag. The "qcc" reference is because someday an external project to glue
1386QEMU's <a href=https://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=blob;f=tcg/README;h=bfa2e4ed246c;hb=HEAD>Tiny Code Generator</a>
1387to Fabrice Bellard's old <a href=http://landley.net/hg/tinycc>Tiny C Compiler</a>
1388making a multicall binary that does cc/ld/as for all the targets QEMU
1389supports (then use the
1390<a href=https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe>LLVM C Backend</a>
1391to compile LLVM itself to C for use as a modern replacement for
1392<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront>cfront</a> to bootstrap
1393C++ code) is under consideration
1394as a successor project to toybox. Until then things like objdump -d
1395(requiring target-specific disassembly for an unbounded number of architectures)
1396are out of scope for toybox. (This means drawing the line somewhere between
1397architecture-specific support in file and strace, and including a full
1398assembler for each architecture.)</p>
1399</span>
1400
1401<h3>Packages from LFS ch6 toybox does NOT plan to replace:</h3>
1402
1403<blockquote><p><b>
1404linux-api-headers man-pages glibc zlib readline gmp mpfr mpc gcc pkg-config
1405ncurses acl libcap psmisc iana-etc libtool gdbm gperf expat perl XML::Parser
1406intltool autoconf automake gettext libelf libffi openssl python ninja meson
1407check groff grub libpipeline texinfo
1408</b></p></blockquote>
1409
1410<p>That said, we do implement our own zlib and readline replacements, and
1411presumably _could_ export them as library bindings. Plus we provide
1412our own version of a bunch of the section 1 man pages (as command help).
1413Possibly libcap and acl are interesting?</p>
1414
1415<h3>Misc</h3>
1416
1417<p>The kbd package has over a dozen commands, we only implement chvt. The
1418iproute2 package implements over a dozen commands, there's an "ip" in
1419pending but I'm not a fan (ifconfig and route and such should be extended
1420to work properly). We don't implement eudev, but toybox's maintainer
1421created busybox mdev way back when (which replaces it) and plans to do a
1422new one for toybox as soon as we work out what subset is still needed now that
1423devtmpfs is available.</p>
1424
1425<hr /><a name=todo /><h2>TODO list</h2>
1426
1427<ul>
1428<li><p>Fill out "development" command list (finish toysh, implement awk, etc.)</p></li>
1429
1430<p><li>Handle "pending" directory.
1431<ul>
1432<li>Cleanup and promote the "pending" commands used to run mkroot.</li>
1433<ul><li>Enabled by $PENDING in mkroot.sh (sh route)</li></ul>
1434
1435<li>Cleanup and promote the "pending" commands used to build mkroot.</li>
1436<ul><li>In scripts/install.sh the $PENDING list symlinked from the host $PATH
1437into "make airlock" directory (expr git tr bash sh gzip   awk bison flex make).</li></ul>
1438<li>Cleanup and promote all $PENDING commands used by android
1439<ul><li><b>grep pending Android.bp</b>
1440in <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox>their repo</a>
1441(diff expr tr brctl getfattr lsof modprobe more stty traceroute vi)</li></ul>
1442</li>
1443
1444<li>Cleanup/promote/delete remaining "pending" commands</li>
1445<ul><li>Once empty, remove toys/pending and maybe collape together other
1446directories into just toys/*.c (with "default n" meaning examples, and
1447a "posix_defconfig" target alongside macos/bsd/android).</li></ul>
1448
1449</ul></li></p>
1450
1451<li><p>Replace kconfig/ with a new implementation (menu/def/yes/no/old).</p></li>
1452
1453<p><li>Automate Linux From Scratch build.
1454<ul>
1455
1456<li>Automate the <a href=https://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/stable/LFS-BOOK-12.0-NOCHUNKS.html>existing build</a>
1457<ul>
1458<li>create chroot directory from host (chapters 4-6)</li>
1459<li>setup/launch chroot directory (start of chapter 7)</li>
1460<li>build in chroot directory (chapters 7-10)</li>
1461</ul>
1462</li>
1463
1464<li>Add record-commands support (both inside and outside chroot)</li>
1465<li>Build host-&gt;chroot part with PATH=$PWD/airlock (moving one command over at a time)
1466<ul><li>Set up native compiler, enumerate/build/install "temp stuff" toybox
1467doesn't provide yet (make, busybox commands, etc).</li></ul>
1468</li>
1469
1470<li>Run host-&gt;chroot build under mkroot, with airlock built+packaged for
1471target (toybox, native compiler, temp stuff from busybox or "make")</li>
1472<li>Run chroot build to completion in chroot under mkroot (kernel etc smoketest)</li>
1473<li>Run chroot build outside chroot (keeping toybox at start of $PATH)
1474to prove toybox commands sufficient to build ALL packages</li>
1475<li>Package LFS build (mkroot/packages/lfs)
1476
1477<ul>
1478<li>host/chroot/target build scripts</li>
1479<li><a href=http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/lfs/lfs-packages/>download</a> and
1480setup packages.</li>
1481<li>Note: I already did this <a href=https://github.com/landley/control-images/tree/master/images/lfs-bootstrap/mnt>long ago</a> for LFS 6.7.</li>
1482</li>
1483</ul>
1484
1485</ul></p>
1486
1487<li><p>1.0 release</p></li>
1488
1489<li><p>Tackle AOSP build.</p></li>
1490</ul>
1491
1492<!-- #include "footer.html" -->
1493
1494