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} <(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 $PENDING commands used by android 1439<ul><li><b>grep pending Android.bp</b> 1440in <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox>their repo</a> 1441(diff expr tr brctl getfattr lsof modprobe more stty traceroute vi)</li></ul> 1442</li> 1443 1444<li>Cleanup/promote/delete remaining "pending" commands</li> 1445<ul><li>Once empty, remove toys/pending and maybe collape together other 1446directories into just toys/*.c (with "default n" meaning examples, and 1447a "posix_defconfig" target alongside macos/bsd/android).</li></ul> 1448 1449</ul></li></p> 1450 1451<li><p>Replace kconfig/ with a new implementation (menu/def/yes/no/old).</p></li> 1452 1453<p><li>Automate Linux From Scratch build. 1454<ul> 1455 1456<li>Automate the <a href=https://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/stable/LFS-BOOK-12.0-NOCHUNKS.html>existing build</a> 1457<ul> 1458<li>create chroot directory from host (chapters 4-6)</li> 1459<li>setup/launch chroot directory (start of chapter 7)</li> 1460<li>build in chroot directory (chapters 7-10)</li> 1461</ul> 1462</li> 1463 1464<li>Add record-commands support (both inside and outside chroot)</li> 1465<li>Build host->chroot part with PATH=$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->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