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=#susv5>POSIX-2024/SUSv5</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 command line standards are:</p> 36<ol> 37<li>POSIX-2024 (also known as SUSv5)</li> 38<li>the Linux Standard Base version 4.1 (frozen, becoming obsolete)</li> 39<li>the official <a href=https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/>Linux man pages</a></li> 40</ol> 41But each of those include commands we've decided not implement and/or exclude 42commands or features we have, nor do they always entirely match reality.</p> 43 44<p>The most thorough real world test (other than a large interactive 45userbase) is using toybox as the command line in a 46<a href=https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>build system</a> container 47where it can rebuild itself from source code, then using the result 48to <a href=https://github.com/landley/control-images>build Linux From Scratch</a>. 49The current "minimal native development system" goal is to use 50<a href=faq.html#mkroot>mkroot</a> 51plus <a href=faq.html#cross>musl-cross-make</a> to hermetically build 52<a href=https://source.android.com>AOSP</a>.</p> 53 54<p>Over the years we've also checked what commands were provided by similar 55projects (klibc, sash, sbase, embutils, nash, beastiebox...), looked at various 56vendor configurations of busybox, and collected end user requests.</p> 57 58<p>Finally, we'd like to provide a good replacement for the Bash shell, 59which was the first program Linux ever ran (leading up to the 0.0.1 release 60in 1991) and remains the standard shell of Linux (no matter what Ubuntu says). 61This doesn't necessarily mean including every last Bash 5.x feature, but 62does involve {various,features} <(beyond) posix.</p> 63 64<p>See the <a href=status.html>status page</a> for the current categorized 65command list and progress towards implementing it.</p> 66 67<hr /> 68<a name="standards"> 69<h2>Use case: standards compliance.</h2> 70 71<h3><a name=susv4 /><a name=susv5 /><a href="#susv5">POSIX-2024/SUSv5</a></h3> 72<p>The best standards describe reality rather than attempting to impose a 73new one. I.E. "A good standard should document, not legislate." 74Standards which document existing reality tend to be approved by 75more 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 1003.1-2024, 76the Single Unix Specification version 5, and the Open Group Base Specification 77Issue 8 are all the same standard from three sources, which most people just 78call "posix" (short for "portable operating system that works like unix"). 79It's available <a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/>online 80in full</a> 81https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>online in full</a>, and may 82be <a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/download>downloaded</a> 83as a tarball. Previous versions 84(<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition/>SUSv4</a>, 85<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/>SUSv3</a> and 86<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7990989775/>SUSv2</a>) 87are also available.</p> 88 89<p>The original Posix was a collection of different standards (POSIX.1 90from 1988, POSIX.1b from 1993, and POSIX.1c from 1995). The unified 91SUSv2 came out in 1997 and SUSv3 came out in 2001. SUSv4 came out in 2008 92and remained the current version for 16 years (although it was 93re-released in 2013, 2016, and 2018 with basically typo fixes, but was 94still SUSv4 and Issue 7), until the current SUSv5 (Issue 8) finally came out 95in 2024.</p> 96 97<h3>Why not just use posix for everything?</h3> 98 99<p>Unfortunately, Posix describes an incomplete subset of reality, because 100it was designed to. Those first few pre-SUSv2 Posix standards that remain 101unavailable on the Open Group's wesite were produced during a period known as 102"<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars>the unix wars</a>" when 103AT&T's prioprietary control over the original UNIX(tm) intellectual property 104sucked the old UNIX(tm) ecosystem dry until Linux and FreeBSD swept away 105the irrelevant debris. That's why the standards process started with proprietary 106unix vendors collaborating to describe what little functionality their 107fragmented APIs could agree on, which was then incorporated into 108<a href=https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub151-2-1993.pdf>US federal procurement standards</a> 109as a <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI>compliance requirement</a> 110for things like navy contracts, giving large corporations 111like IBM and Microsoft millions of dollars of incentive 112to punch holes in the standard big enough to drive 113<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem>Windows NT</a> and 114<a href=http://www.naspa.net/magazine/1996/May/T9605006.PDF>OS/360</a> through. 115When open source projects like Linux started developing on the internet 116(enabled by the 1993 <a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September>relaxation</a> of the National Science Foundation's 117"Acceptable Use Policy" allowing everyone to connect to the internet, 118previously restricted to approved government/military/university organizations 119until the budget funding its backbone links passed from DARPA to NSF), 120Posix <a href=http://www.opengroup.org/testing/fips/policy_info.html>ignored 121the upstarts</a> and Linux eventually 122<a href=https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3417>returned the favor</a>, 123leaving Posix behind.</p> 124 125<p>The result is a "standard" that lacks any mention of commands like 126"init" or "mount" required to actually boot a system. 127It describes logname but not login. It provides ipcrm 128and ipcs, but not ipcmk, so you can use System V IPC resources but not create 129them. And widely used real-world commands such as tar and cpio (the basis 130of initramfs and RPM) which were present in earlier 131versions of the standard have been removed, while obsolete commands like 132cksum, compress, sccs and uucp remain with no mention of modern counterparts 133like crc32/sha1sum, gzip/xz, svn/git or scp/rsync. Meanwhile posix' description 134of the commands 135themselves are missing dozens of features, and specify silly things like ebcdic 136support in dd or that wc should use %d (not %lld) for byte counts. So 137we have to extensively filter posix to get a useful set of recommendations.</p> 138 139<h3>Analysis</h3> 140 141<p>Starting with the 142<a href="http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition/idx/utilities.html">full "utilities" list</a>, 143we first remove generally obsolete 144commands (compress ed ex pr uncompress uccp uustat uux), commands for the 145pre-CVS "SCCS" source control system (admin delta get prs rmdel sact sccs unget 146val what), fortran support (asa fort77), and batch processing support (batch 147qalter qdel qhold qmove qmsg qrerun qrls qselect qsig qstat qsub).</p> 148 149<p>Some commands are for a compiler toolchain (ar c99 cflow ctags cxref gencat 150iconv lex m4 make nm strings strip yacc) which is out of scope for 151toybox and should be supplied externally. (Some of these might be 152revisited later, but not for toybox 1.0.)</p> 153 154<p>Some commands are part of a command shell, and can't be implemented as 155separate executables (alias bg cd command fc fg getopts hash jobs kill read 156type ulimit umask unalias wait). These may be implemented as part of the 157built-in toybox shell, but are not exported into $PATH via symlinks and 158thus are not part of toybox's main command list. (If you fork a 159child process and have it "cd" then exit, you've accomplished nothing.) 160Again, what posix lists as "commands" is incomplete: a shell also needs exit, if, while, 161for, case, export, set, unset, trap, exec... (And for bash compatibility 162function, source, declare...)</p> 163 164<p>A few other commands are judgement calls, providing command-line 165internationalization support (iconv locale localedef), System V inter-process 166communication (ipcrm ipcs), and cross-tty communication from the minicomputer 167days (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, 168"mailx" is 169a command line email client, and "lp" submits files for printing to... what 170exactly? (cups?) The standard defines crontab but not crond. What is 171pathchk supposed to be portable _to_? (Linux accepts 255 byte path components 172with any char except NUL or / and no max length on the total path, and 173<a href=https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html>EXPLICITLY</a> 174doesn't care if it's an invalid utf8 sequence.)</p> 175 176<p>Removing all of that leaves the following commands, which toybox should 177implement:</p> 178 179<blockquote><b> 180<span id=posix> 181at awk basename bc cal cat chgrp chmod chown cksum cmp comm cp 182csplit cut date dd df diff dirname du echo env expand expr false file find 183fold fuser getconf grep head id join kill link ln logger logname ls man 184mkdir mkfifo more mv newgrp nice nl nohup od paste patch printf ps 185pwd renice rm rmdir sed sh sleep sort split stty tabs tail tee test time 186touch tput tr true tsort tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode uuencode vi wc 187who xargs zcat 188</span> 189</b></blockquote> 190 191<h3><a name=sigh /><a href="#sigh">Linux Standard Base</a></h3> 192 193<p>One attempt to supplement POSIX towards an actual usable system was the 194Linux Standard Base. Unfortunately, the quality of this "standard" is 195fairly low, largely due to the Free Standards Group that maintained it 196being consumed by <a href=https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#18-07-2010>the Linux Foundation</a> in 2007.</p> 197 198<p>Where POSIX allowed its standards process to be compromised 199by leaving things out (but what 200they DID standardize tends to be respected, if sometimes obsolete), 201the Linux Standard Base's failure mode was different. They responded to 202pressure by including anything their members paid them enough to promote, 203such as allowing Red Hat to push 204RPM into the standard even though all sorts of distros (Debian, Slackware, Arch, 205Gentoo, Android, Alpine...) don't use it and never will. This means anything in the LSB is 206at best a suggestion: arbitrary portions of this standard are widely 207ignored.</p> 208 209<p>The <a href=https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/39546.html>community perception</a> 210seems to be that the Linux Standard Base is 211the best standard money can buy: the Linux Foundation is supported by 212financial donations from large companies and the LSB 213<a href=https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2016/apr/11/lf/>represents the interests 214of those donors</a> regardless of technical merit. (The Linux Foundation, which 215maintains the LSB, is NOT a 501c3. It's a 501c6, the 216same kind of legal entity as the Tobacco Institute and 217<a href=https://lwn.net/Articles/706585/>Microsoft's</a> 218old "<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Copy_That_Floppy>Don't Copy That Floppy</a>" campaign.) Debian officially 219<a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/658809>washed its hands of LSB</a> by 220refusing to adopt release 5.0 in 2015, and no longer even pretends to support 221it (which affects Debian derivatives like Ubuntu and Knoppix). Toybox has 222stayed on 4.1 for similar reasons.</p> 223 224<p>That said, Posix by itself isn't enough, and this is the next most 225comprehensive standards effort for Linux so far, so we salvage what we can. 226A lot of historical effort went into producing the standard before the 227Linux Foundation took over.</p> 228 229<h3>Analysis</h3> 230 231<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 232utilities</a>:</p> 233 234<blockquote><b> 235ar at awk batch bc chfn chsh col cpio crontab df dmesg du echo egrep 236fgrep file fuser gettext grep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups 237gunzip gzip hostname install install_initd ipcrm ipcs killall lpr ls 238lsb_release m4 md5sum mknod mktemp more mount msgfmt newgrp od passwd 239patch pidof remove_initd renice sed sendmail seq sh shutdown su sync 240tar umount useradd userdel usermod xargs zcat 241</b></blockquote> 242 243<p>Where posix specifies one of those commands, LSB's deltas tended to be 244accomodations for broken tool versions which ween't up to date with the 245standard 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> 246for examples.)</p> 247 248<p>Since we've already committed to using our own judgement to skip bits of 249POSIX, and LSB's "judgement" in this regard is purely bug workarounds to declare 250various legacy tool implementations "compliant", this means we're mostly 251interested in the set of LSB tools that aren't mentioned in posix.</p> 252 253<p>Of these, gettext and msgfmt are internationalization, install_initd and 254remove_initd weren't present even in Ubuntu 10.04, lpr is out of scope, 255lsb_release just reports information in /etc/os-release, and sendmail's 256turned into a pile of cryptographic verification and DNS shenanigans due 257to spammers.</p> 258 259<p>This leaves:</p> 260 261<blockquote><b> 262<span id=lsb> 263chfn chsh dmesg egrep fgrep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups 264gunzip gzip hostname install killall md5sum 265mknod mktemp mount passwd pidof seq shutdown 266su sync tar umount useradd userdel usermod zcat 267</span> 268</b></blockquote> 269 270<h3><a name=rfc /><a href="#rfc">IETF RFCs and Man Pages</a></h3> 271 272<p>They're very nice, but there's thousands of them. The signal to noise 273ratio here is terrible.</p> 274 275<p>Discussion of standards wouldn't be complete without the Internet 276Engineering Task Force's "<a href=https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-index.txt>Request For Comments</a>" collection and Michael Kerrisk's 277<a href=https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/>Linux man-pages project</a>... 278except these aren't standards, they're collections of documentation with 279low barriers to inclusion. They're not saying "you should support 280X", they're saying "if you do, here's how". 281Thus neither really helps us select which commands to include.</p> 282 283<p>The man pages website includes the commands in git, yum, perf, postgres, 284flatpack... Great for examining the features of a command you've 285already decided to include, useless for deciding _what_ to include.</p> 286 287<p>The RFCs are more about protocols than commands. The noise level is 288extremely high: there's thousands of RFCs, many describing a proposed idea 289that never took off, and less than 1% of the resulting documents are 290currently relevant to toybox. The documents are numbered based on the 291order they were received, with no real attempt at coherently indexing 292the result. As with man pages they can be <a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0610.txt>long and complicated</a> or 293<a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951.txt>terse and impenetrable</a>, 294have 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 295they <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. 296(This is an example of the greybeard community problem, where all current 297documentation was written by people who don't remember NOT already knowing 298this stuff and the resources they originally learned from are long gone, 299and <a href=https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/buildroot.html>excellent</a> 300<a href=https://landley.net/kdocs/mirror/lki-single.html>historical</a> 301<a href=https://linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/OLD/bsd-init.txt>documents</a> 302have no obvious modern alternative.)</p> 303 304<p>That said, RFC documents can be useful (especially for networking protocols) 305and the four URL templates provided by the recommended starting files 306for new commands (hello.c and skeleton.c in the toys/example directory) 307point to example posix, lsb, man, and rfc pages online.</p> 308 309<hr /> 310<a name="dev_env"> 311<h2><a href="#dev_env">Use case: provide a self-hosting development environment</a></h2> 312 313<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 314environment, 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> 315 316<blockquote><b> 317<span id=development> 318bzcat cat cp dirname echo env patch rmdir sha1sum sleep sort sync 319true uname wc which yes zcat 320awk basename chmod chown cmp cut date dd diff 321egrep expr fdisk find grep gzip head hostname id install ln ls 322mkdir mktemp mv od readlink rm sed sh tail tar touch tr uniq 323wget whoami xargs chgrp comm gunzip less logname split 324tee test time bunzip2 chgrp chroot comm cpio dmesg 325dnsdomainname ftpget ftpput gunzip ifconfig init 326logname losetup mdev mount mountpoint nc pgrep pkill 327pwd route split stat switch_root tac umount vi 328resize2fs tune2fs fsck.ext2 genext2fs mke2fs xzcat 329</span> 330</b></blockquote> 331 332<p>This use case includes running init scripts and other shell scripts, running 333configure, make, and install in each package, and providing basic command line 334facilities such as a text editor. (It does not include a compiler toolchain or 335C library, those are outside the scope of the toybox project, although mkroot 336has a <a href=https://landley.net/code/qcc>potential follow-up project</a>. 337For now we use distro toolchains, 338<a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a>, 339and the Android NDK for build testing.) 340That build system also installed bash 2.05b as #!/bin/sh and its scripts 341required bash extensions not present in shells such as busybox ash. 342To replace that, toysh needs to supply several bash extensions _and_ work 343when called under the name "bash".</p> 344 345<p>The above command list was collected using a command line recording wrapper 346(mkroot/record-commands and toys/example/logpath.c) which mkroot/mkroot.sh 347also uses to populate root/build/log/*-commands.txt. Try 348<b>awk '{print $1}' root/build/log/*-commands.txt | sort -u | grep -v musl | xargs</b> 349after building a mkroot target to see the list of commands called out 350of the $PATH during that build.</p> 351 352<h3>Stages and moving targets</h3> 353 354<p>The development environment use case has two stages, achieving: 3551) a bootable system that can rebuild itself from source, and 2) 356a build environment capable 357of bootstrapping up to arbitrary complexity (by building 358Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch under the resulting 359system, or the Android Open Source Project). To accomplish just the first 360goal (a minimal system that can rebuild _itself_ from source), the old 361build still needs the following busybox commands for which toybox does 362not yet supply adequate replacements:</p> 363 364<blockquote><b> 365awk diff expr fdisk gzip less route sh tr unxz vi xzcat 366</b></blockquote> 367 368<p>All of those except awk and less have partial implementations 369in "pending".</p> 370 371<p>In 2017 Aboriginal Linux development ended, replaced by a much simpler 372project ("mkroot") designed to use an existing cross+native toolchain (such as 373<a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a> 374or the Android NDK) instead of building its own cross and native compilers 375from source. In 2019 the still-incomplete 376mkroot was merged into toybox as the "make root" target (which runs 377mkroot/mkroot.sh). This is intended 378as a simpler way of providing essentially the same build environment, and doesn't 379significantly affect the rest of this analysis (although the "rebuild itself 380from source" test should now include building musl-cross-make under either 381mkroot or toybox's "make airlock" host environment).</p> 382 383<p>Toybox source includes 384a <b>scripts/mcm-buildall.sh</b> wrapper script around musl-cross-make, which 385builds cross and native versions of gcc+musl toolchains for a dozen 386different architectures, and a <b>mkroot/testroot.sh</b> that boots 387all the <b>mkroot/mkroot CROSS=allnonstop LINUX=~/linux</b> systems under 388qemu and performs basic automated smoketesting that they run, have a current 389clock, and their network and block device support works. The "make airlock" 390target is implemented by <b>scripts/install.sh</b> which sets the 391$PENDING and $TOOLCHAIN variables to lists of commands to symlink out of the 392host.</p> 393 394<p>Building Linux From Scratch is not the same as building the 395<a href=https://source.android.com>Android Open Source Project</a>, 396but after toybox 1.0 we plan to try 397<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#hairball>modifying the AOSP build</a> 398to reduce dependencies. (It's fairly likely we'll have to add at least 399a read-only git utility so repo can download the build's source code, 400but that's actually <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-lGyn3PHP4>not 401that hard</a>. We'll probably also need our own "make" at some point after 4021.0, which is its own moving target thanks to cmake and ninja and so on.) 403The ongoing Android <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2018-January/009330.html>hermetic build</a> work is already advancing 404this goal.</p> 405 406<hr /> 407<h2><a name=android /><a href="#android">Use case: Replacing Android Toolbox</a></h2> 408 409<p>Android has a policy against GPL in userspace, so even though BusyBox 410predates Android by many years, they didn't use it. Instead they grabbed 411an old version of ash (later replaced by 412<a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a>) 413and implemented their own command line utility set 414called "toolbox" (which toybox has already mostly replaced).</p> 415 416<p>Toolbox doesn't have its own repository, instead it's part of Android's 417<a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core>system/core 418git repository</a>. Android's Native Development Kit (their standalone 419downloadable toolchain) has its own 420<a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/Roadmap.md>roadmap</a>, and each version has 421<a href=https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/revision_history>release 422notes</a>.</p> 423 424<h3>Toolbox commands:</h3> 425 426<p>According to <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/toolbox/Android.bp> 427system/core/toolbox/Android.bp</a> the toolbox directory builds the 428following commands:</p> 429 430<blockquote><b> 431getevent getprop modprobe setprop start 432</b></blockquote> 433 434<p>getprop/setprop/start were in toybox and moved back because they're so 435tied to non-public system interfaces. modprobe shares the implementation 436used in init. getevent is a board bringup tool built with a python script 437that pulls all the constants from the latest kernel headers.</p> 438 439<h3>Other Android /system/bin commands</h3> 440 441<p>Other than the toolbox links, the currently interesting 442binaries in /system/bin are:</p> 443 444<ul> 445<li><b>arping</b> - ARP REQUEST tool (iputils)</li> 446<li><b>blkid</b> - identify block devices (e2fsprogs)</li> 447<li><b>e2fsck</b> - fsck for ext2/ext3/ext4 (e2fsprogs)</li> 448<li><b>fsck.f2fs</b> - fsck for f2fs (f2fs-tools)</li> 449<li><b>fsck_msdos</b> - fsck for FAT (BSD)</li> 450<li><b>gzip</b> - compression/decompression tool (zlib)</li> 451<li><b>ip</b> - network routing tool (iproute2)</li> 452<li><b>iptables/ip6tables</b> - IPv4/IPv6 NAT admin (iptables)</li> 453<li><b>iw</b> - wireless device config tool (iw)</li> 454<li><b>logwrapper</b> - redirect stdio to android log (Android)</li> 455<li><b>make_ext4fs</b> - make ext4 fs (Android)</li> 456<li><b>make_f2fs</b> - make f2fs fs (f2fs-tools)</li> 457<li><b>ping/ping6</b> - ICMP ECHO_REQUEST tool (iputils)</li> 458<li><b>reboot</b> - reboot (Android)</li> 459<li><b>resize2fs</b> - resize ext2/ext3/ext4 fs (e2fsprogs)</li> 460<li><b>sh</b> - mksh (BSD)</li> 461<li><b>ss</b> - socket statistics (iproute2)</li> 462<li><b>tc</b> - traffic control (iproute2)</li> 463<li><b>tracepath/tracepath6</b> - trace network path (iputils)</li> 464<li><b>traceroute/traceroute6</b> - trace network route (iputils)</li> 465</ul> 466 467<p>The names in parentheses are the upstream source of the command.</p> 468 469<h3>Analysis</h3> 470 471<p>For reference, combining everything listed above that's still "fair game" 472for toybox, we get:</p> 473 474<blockquote><b> 475arping blkid e2fsck dd fsck.f2fs fsck_msdos gzip ip iptables 476ip6tables iw logwrapper make_ext4fs make_f2fs modpobe newfs_msdos ping ping6 477reboot resize2fs sh ss tc tracepath tracepath6 traceroute traceroute6 478</b></blockquote> 479 480<p>We may eventually implement all of that, but for toybox 1.0 we need to 481focus a bit. If Android has an acceptable external package, and the command 482isn't needed for system bootstrapping, replacing the external package is 483not a priority.</p> 484 485<p>However, several commands toybox plans to implement anyway could potentially 486replace existing Android versions, so we should take into account Android's use 487cases when doing so. This includes:</p> 488<blockquote><b> 489<span id=toolbox> 490getevent gzip modprobe newfs_msdos sh 491</span> 492</b></blockquote> 493 494<p>Update: Android's <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox/+/refs/heads/main/Android.bp>external/toybox/Android.bp</a> 495builds the following commands out of "pending", which 496should be a priority for cleanup:</p> 497 498<blockquote><b> 499diff expr tr brctl getfattr lsof modprobe more stty traceroute vi 500</b></blockquote> 501 502<p>Android wishlist:</p> 503 504<blockquote><b> 505mtools genvfatfs mke2fs gene2fs 506</b></blockquote> 507 508<hr /> 509<h2><a name=aosp /><a href="#aosp">Use case: Building AOSP</a></h2> 510 511<p>The list of external tools used to build AOSP was 512<a href="https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/soong/+/master/ui/build/paths/config.go">here</a>, 513but as they're switched over to toybox they disappear and reappear 514<a href="https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/build-tools/+/refs/heads/master/path/linux-x86/">here</a>.</p> 515 516<blockquote><b> 517awk basename bash bc bzip2 cat chmod cmp comm cp cut date dd diff dirname dlv du 518echo egrep env expr find fuser getconf getopt git grep gzip head hexdump 519hostname id jar java javap ln ls lsof m4 make md5sum mkdir mktemp mv od openssl 520paste patch pgrep pkill ps pstree pwd python python2.7 python3 readlink 521realpath rm rmdir rsync sed setsid sh sha1sum sha256sum sha512sum 522sleep sort stat tar tail tee touch tr true uname uniq unix2dos unzip 523wc which whoami xargs xxd xz zip zipinfo 524</b></blockquote> 525 526<p>The following are already in the tree and will be used directly:</p> 527 528<blockquote><b> 529awk bc bzip2 jar java javap m4 make python python2.7 python3 xz 530</b></blockquote> 531 532<p>Subtracting what's already in toybox (including the following toybox toys 533that are still in pending: <code>diff expr gzip lsof tr</code>), 534that leaves:</p> 535 536<blockquote><b> 537bash fuser git hexdump openssl pstree rsync sh unzip zip zipinfo 538</b></blockquote> 539 540<p>For AOSP, zip/zipinfo/unzip are likely to be libziparchive based. 541git/openssl seem like they should just be brought in to the tree. rsync is 542used to work around a Mac <code>cp -Rf</code> bug with broken symbolic links. 543That leaves:</p> 544 545<blockquote><b> 546bash fuser hexdump pstree 547</b></blockquote> 548 549<p>(Why are fuser and pstree used during the AOSP build? They're used for 550diagnostics if something goes wrong. So it's really just bash and hexdump 551that are actually used to build.)</p> 552 553<hr /> 554<h2><a name=tizen /><a href="#tizen">Use case: Tizen Core</a></h2> 555 556<p>A side effect of the Linux Foundation following the money to the 557exclusion of all else is they "support" their donors' myriad often 558contradictory pet projects with elaborate announcements and press releases. 559Long ago when Nokia's Maemo merged 560with 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> 561about unifying fragmented vendor efforts. Then MeeGo merged with 562<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMo_Foundation>LiMo</a> to 563<a href=notes-2012.html#16-05-2012>form Tizen</a>, 564which became a Samsung-only project (that <a href=https://www.androidheadlines.com/2021/05/samsung-tvs-continue-use-tizen-os.html>still ships</a> 565inside <a href=https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1453747613686288385>televisions</a>, 566but was otherwise subsumed into <a href=https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/18/22440483/samsung-smartwatch-google-wearos-tizen-watch>Android GO</a>).</p> 567 568<p>Along the way, the Tizen project expressed a desire to eliminate GPLv3 software 569from its core system, and in installing toybox as 570<a href=https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Toybox>part of this process</a>.</p> 571 572<p>They had a fairly long list of new commands they wanted to see in toybox:</p> 573 574<blockquote><b> 575<span id=tizen_cmd> 576arch base64 users unexpand shred join csplit 577hostid nproc runcon sha224sum sha256sum sha384sum sha512sum sha3sum mkfs.vfat fsck.vfat 578dosfslabel uname pinky diff3 sdiff zcmp zdiff zegrep zfgrep zless zmore 579</span> 580</b></blockquote> 581 582<p>In addition, they wanted to use several commands then in pending:</p> 583 584<blockquote><b> 585<span id=tizen> 586tar diff printf wget rsync fdisk vi less tr test stty fold expr dd 587</span> 588</b></blockquote> 589 590<p>Also, tizen uses a different Linux Security Module called SMACK, so 591many of the SELinux options ala ls -Z needed smack alternatives in an 592if/else setup. We added lib/lsm.h to abstract this, but haven't heard 593from Tizen in years and have started implementing SELinux support without 594Smack support in places like tar.c. At some point, lib/lsm.h may go away 595due to lack of expressed interest.</p> 596 597<hr /> 598<h2><a name=yocto /><a href="#yocto">Use case: Yocto</a></h2> 599 600<p>Another project the Linux Foundation is paid to appreciate is Yocto, 601which was designed to fix the ongoing proprietary fragmentation problem 602(now in Linux build systems instead of vendor unix forks) by being the 603build system equivalent of a glue trap. While proclaiming that having the 604"minimum level of standardization" contributes to a "strong ecosystem", 605Yocto uses a "<a href=https://www.yoctoproject.org/software-overview/layers/>layered</a>" 606design where everybody who touches it is encouraged to add more and more layers 607of 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 608the layers (let alone their contents). But -- and this is the 609important bit -- all these dispirate forks are called "yocto" and built on 610top of giant piles of code the Linux Foundation can take credit for 611since they filed the serial numbers off OpenEmbedded. (And THEN users 612are encouraged to check the result into their own repository as one 613big initial commit, discarding all layers and history.)</p> 614 615<p>Yocto's "core-image-minimal" target (only 3,106 build steps in the 3.3 616release, which includes building host versions of gnome packages and 617<a href=https://landley.net/notes-2019.html#06-02-2019>something called</a> 618the "uninative binary shim") builds a busybox-based system with the following commands:</p> 619 620<blockquote><b> 621<span id=yocto_cmd> 622addgroup adduser ascii sh awk base32 basename blkid bunzip2 bzcat bzip2 cat 623chattr chgrp chmod chown chroot chvt clear cmp cp cpio crc32 cut date dc dd 624deallocvt delgroup deluser depmod df diff dirname dmesg dnsdomainname du 625dumpkmap dumpleases echo egrep env expr false fbset fdisk fgrep find flock 626free fsck fstrim fuser getopt getty grep groups gunzip gzip head hexdump 627hostname hwclock id ifconfig ifdown ifup insmod ip kill killall klogd less 628ln loadfont loadkmap logger logname logread losetup ls lsmod lzcat md5sum 629mesg microcom mkdir mkfifo mknod mkswap mktemp modprobe more mount mountpoint 630mv nc netstat nohup nproc nslookup od openvt patch pgrep pidof pivot_root 631printf ps pwd rdate readlink realpath reboot renice reset resize rev rfkill 632rm rmdir rmmod route run-parts sed seq setconsole setsid sh sha1sum sha256sum 633shuf sleep sort start-stop-daemon stat strings stty sulogin swapoff swapon 634switch_root sync sysctl syslogd tail tar tee telnet test tftp time top touch 635tr true ts tty udhcpc udhcpd umount uname uniq unlink unzip uptime users 636usleep vi watch wc wget which who whoami xargs xzcat yes zcat 637</span> 638</b></blockquote> 639 640<p>Nobody seems entirely sure why.</p> 641 642<a name="fhs" /> 643<hr /><a href=fhs>Filesystem Hierachy Standard</a> 644<h2>Filesystem Hierarchy Standard:</h2> 645 646<p>Another standard taken over by the Linux Foundation. (At least the 647links to this one didn't <a href=http://lanana.org/>go 404</a> the 648instant they took it over). Of historical interest due to what it 649managed to achieve before they chased away the hobbyists maintaining it. 650Only one version (3.0 in 2015) has been released since the Linux Foundation 651absorbed the FHS. The previous release, Version 2.3, was released in 2004. 652The Linux Foundation did not retain earlier versions. The contents of 653the relevant sections appear identical between the two versions, in the 65411 years between releases the Linux Foundation just added section numbers.</p> 655 656<p><a href=https://refspects.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs-3.0.html>FHS 3.0</a> 657section 3.4.2 requires commands to be in the /bin directory, and then 3.4.3 658has an optional list, 659and then 3.16.2 and 3.16.3 similarly cover /sbin. There are linux 660specific sections in 6.1.2 and 6.1.6 but everything in them is obsolete.</p> 661 662<p>The /bin options include csh but not bash, and ed but not vi. 663The /sbin options have "update" which seems obsolete (filesystem 664buffers haven't needed a userspace process to flush them for DECADES), 665"fastboot" and "fasthalt" (reboot and halt have -nf), and 666fsck.* and mkfs.* that don't actually specify any specific filesystems. 667Removing that gives us:</p> 668 669<blockquote><b> 670<span id=fhs_cmd> 671cat chgrp chmod chown cp date dd df dmesg echo false hostname kill ln 672login ls mkdir mknod more mount mv ps pwd rm rmdir sed sh stty su sync true 673umount uname tar cpio gzip gunzip zcat netstat ping 674shutdown fdisk getty halt ifconfig init mkswap reboot route swapon swapoff 675</span> 676</b></blockquote> 677 678<hr /><a name=buildroot /> 679<h2>buildroot:</h2> 680 681<p>If a toybox-based development environment is to support running 682buildroot under it, the <a href=https://buildroot.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#requirement-mandatory>mandatory packages</a> 683section of the buildroot manual lists:</p> 684 685<blockquote><p><b> 686which sed make bash patch gzip bzip2 tar cpio unzip rsync file bc wget 687</b></p></blockquote> 688 689<p>(It also lists binutils gcc g++ perl python, and for debian it wants 690the build-essential meta-package. And it wants file to be in /usr/bin because 691<a href=https://git.busybox.net/buildroot/tree/support/dependencies/dependencies.sh?h=2018.02.x#n84>libtool 692breaks otherwise</a>.)</p> 693 694<p>Oddly, buildroot can't NOT cross compile. Buildroot does not support a cross toolchain that lives in "/usr/bin" 695with a prefix of "". If you try, and chop out the test for a blank prefix, 696it dies trying to run "/usr/bin/-gcc". In theory you can modify any open source 697project to do anything if you rewrite enough of it, but buildroot's developers 698explicitly do not support this usage model.</p> 699 700<hr /><a name=klibc /> 701<h2>klibc:</h2> 702 703<p>Long ago some kernel developers came up with a project called 704<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klibc>klibc</a>. 705After a decade of development it still has no web page or HOWTO, 706and nobody's quite sure if the license is BSD or GPL. It inexplicably 707<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 708replacement.</p> 709 710<p>In addition to a C library less general-purpose than old versions of bionic 711(let alone musl), klibc builds a random assortment of executables to run init scripts 712with. There's no multiplexer command, these are individual executables:</p> 713 714<blockquote><p><b> 715cat chroot cpio dd dmesg false fixdep fstype gunzip gzip halt ipconfig kill 716kinit ln losetup ls minips mkdir mkfifo mknodes 717mksyntax mount mv nfsmount nuke pivot_root poweroff readlink reboot resume 718run-init sh sha1hash sleep sync true umount uname zcat 719</b></p></blockquote> 720 721<p>To get that list, build klibc according to the instructions (I 722<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#23-01-2013>looked at</a> version 7232.0.2 and did cd klibc-*; ln -s /output/of/kernel/make/headers_install 724linux; make) then <b>echo $(for i in $(find . -type f); do file $i | grep -q 725executable && basename $i; done | grep -v '[.]g$' | sort -u)</b> to find 726executables, then eliminate the *.so files and *.shared duplicates.</p> 727 728<p>Some of those binaries are build-time tools that don't get installed, 729which removes mknodes, mksyntax, sha1hash, and fixdep from the list. 730(And sha1hash is just an unpolished sha1sum anyway.)</p> 731 732<p>The run-init command is more commonly called switch_root, nuke is just 733"rm -rf -- $@", and minips is more commonly called "ps": I'm not doing aliases 734for these oddball names. 735The "kinit" command is another gratuitous rename, it's init running as PID 1. 736The halt, poweroff, and reboot commands work with it. 737Yet more stale forks of dash and gzip got sucked in here (see "dubious 738license terms" above).</p> 739 740<p>In theory "blkid" or "file" handle fstype (and df for mounted filesystems), 741but we could do fstype. We should also implement nfsmount, and probably smbmount 742and p9mount even though this hasn't got one. (The reason these aren't 743in the base "mount" command is they interactively query login credentials.) 744The ipconfig command here has a built in dhcp client, so it's ifconfig 745and dhcpcd and maybe some other stuff.</p> 746 747<p>The resume command is... weird. It finds a swap partition and reads data 748from it into a /proc file, something the kernel is capable of doing itself. 749(Even though the klibc author 750<a href=http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/klibc/2006-June/001748.html>attempted 751to remove</a> that capability from the kernel, current kernel/power/hibernate.c 752still parses "resume=" on the command line). And yet various distros seem to 753make use of klibc for this. 754Given the history of swsusp/hibernate (and 755<a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/333007>TuxOnIce</a> 756and <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/242107>kexec jump</a>...) I've lost track 757of the current state of the art here. Ah, Documentation/power/userland-swsusp.txt 758has the API docs, and <a href=http://suspend.sf.net>here's a better 759tool</a>...</p> 760 761<p>This gives us a klibc command list:</p> 762 763<blockquote><b> 764<span id=klibc_cmd> 765cat chroot dmesg false kill ln losetup ls mkdir mkfifo readlink rm switch_root 766sleep sync true uname 767 768cpio dd ps mv pivot_root 769mount nfsmount fstype umount 770sh gunzip gzip zcat 771kinit halt poweroff reboot 772ipconfig 773resume 774</span> 775</b></blockquote> 776 777<hr /> 778<a name=glibc /> 779<h2>glibc</h2> 780 781<p>Rather a lot of command line utilities come bundled with glibc:</p> 782 783<blockquote><b> 784catchsegv getconf getent iconv iconvconfig ldconfig ldd locale localedef 785mtrace nscd rpcent rpcinfo tzselect zdump zic 786</b></blockquote> 787 788<p>Of those, musl libc only implements ldd. Of the rest:</p> 789 790<ul> 791<li><b>catchsegv</b> is a rudimentary debugger, probably out of scope for toybox.</li> 792<li><b>iconv</b> has been <a href="#susv4">previously discussed</a>.</li> 793<li><b>iconvconfig</b> is only relevant if iconv is user-configurable; musl uses a 794non-configurable iconv now that utf8+unicode exist.</li> 795<li><b>getconf</b> is a posix utility which displays several variables from 796unistd.h; it probably belongs in the development toolchain.</li> 797<li><b>getent</b> handles retrieving entries from passwd-style databases 798(in a rather lame way) and is trivially replacable by grep.</li> 799<li><b>locale</b> was discussed under <a href=#susv4>posix</a>.</li> 800<li><b>localedef</b> compiles locale definitions, which musl currently does not use.</li> 801<li><b>mtrace</b> is a perl script to use the malloc debugging that glibc has built-in; 802this is not relevant for musl, and would necessarily vary with libc.</li> 803<li><b>nscd</b> is a name service caching daemon, which is not yet relevant for musl.</li> 804<li><b>rpcinfo</b> and <b>rpcent</b> are related to the Remote Procedure Calls 805layer (an old sun technology used by some userspace NFS implementations), 806which musl does not include and debian does not install by default.</li> 807</ul> 808 809<p>The remaining commands involve glibc's bundled timezone database, 810which seems to be derived from the <a href=http://www.iana.org/time-zones>IANA 811timezone database</a>. Unless we want to maintain our own fork of the 812standards body's database like glibc does, these are of no interest, 813but for completeness:</p> 814 815<ul> 816<li><b>tzselect</b> outputs a TZ variable correponding to user input. 817The documentation does not indicate how to use it in a script, but it seems 818that Debian may have done so.</li> 819<li><b>zdump</b> prints current time in each of several timezones, optionally 820outputting a great deal of extra information about each timezone.</li> 821<li><b>zic</b> converts a description of a timezone to a file in tz format.</li> 822</ul> 823 824<p>We implemented getconf and iconv, and I could see maybe arguing for ncsd. 825The rest are not relevant to toybox.</p> 826 827</b></blockquote> 828 829<hr /> 830<a name=sash /> 831<h2>Stand-Alone Shell</h2> 832 833<p>Wikipedia has <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-alone_shell>a good 834summary of sash</a>, with links. The original Stand-Alone Shell project reached 835a stopping point, and then <a href=http://www.baiti.net/sash>"sash plus 836patches"</a> extended it a bit further. The result is a megabyte executable 837that provides 40 commands.</p> 838 839<p>Sash is a shell with built-in commands. It doesn't have a multiplexer 840command, meaning "sash ls -l" doesn't work (you have to go "sash -c 'ls -l'"). 841</p> 842 843<p>The list of commands can be obtained via building it and doing 844"echo help | ./sash | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/^-//' | xargs echo", which 845gives us:</p> 846 847<blockquote><b> 848alias aliasall ar cd chattr chgrp chmod chown cmp cp chroot dd echo ed exec 849exit file find grep gunzip gzip help kill losetup losetup ln ls lsattr mkdir 850mknod more mount mv pivot_root printenv prompt pwd quit rm rmdir setenv source 851sum sync tar touch umask umount unalias where 852</b></blockquote> 853 854<p>Plus sh because it's a shell. A dozen or so commands can only sanely be 855implemented as shell builtins (alias aliasall cd exec exit prompt quit setenv 856source umask unalias), and where is an alias for which.</p> 857 858<p>This leaves:</p> 859 860<blockquote><b> 861<span id=sash_cmd> 862chgrp chmod chown cmp cp chroot echo find grep help kill losetup 863ln ls mkdir mknod mount mv pivot_root printenv pwd rm rmdir sync tar touch umount 864ar chattr dd ed file gunzip gzip lsattr more sh 865</span> 866</b></blockquote> 867 868<p>(For once, this project doesn't include a fork of gzip, instead 869it sucks in -lz from the host.)</p> 870 871<hr /> 872<a name=sbase /> 873<h2>sbase:</h2> 874 875<p>It's <a href=http://git.suckless.org/sbase>on suckless</a> in 876<a href=http://git.suckless.org/ubase>two parts</a>. As of November 2015 it's 877implemented the following (renaming "cron" to "crond" for 878consistency, and yanking "sponge", "mesg", "pagesize", "respawn", and 879"vtallow"):</p> 880 881<blockquote><p> 882<span id=sbase_cmd> 883basename cal cat chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum cmp comm cp crond cut date 884dirname du echo env expand expr false find flock fold getconf grep head 885hostname join kill link ln logger logname ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mktemp mv 886nice nl nohup od paste printenv printf pwd readlink renice rm rmdir sed seq 887setsid sha1sum sha256sum sha512sum sleep sort split strings sync tail 888tar tee test tftp time touch tr true tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode 889uuencode wc which xargs yes 890</span> 891</p></blockquote> 892 893<p>and<p> 894 895<blockquote><p> 896<span id=sbase_cmd> 897chvt clear dd df dmesg eject fallocate free id login mknod mountpoint 898passwd pidof ps stat su truncate unshare uptime watch 899who 900</span> 901</p></blockquote> 902 903<hr /> 904<a name=nash /> 905<h2>nash:</h2> 906 907<p>Red Hat's nash was part of its "mkinitrd" package, replacement for a shell 908and utilities on the boot floppy back in the 1990's (the same general idea 909as BusyBox, developed independently). Red Hat discontinued nash development 910in 2010, replacing it with dracut (which collects together existing packages, 911including busybox).</p> 912 913<p>I couldn't figure out how to beat source code out of 914<a href=http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/git/mkinitrd>Fedora's current git</a> 915repository. The last release version that used it was Fedora Core 12 916which 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> 917that can be unwound with "rpm2cpio mkinitrd.src.rpm | cpio -i -d -H newc 918--no-absolute-filenames" and in there is a mkinitrd-6.0.93.tar.bz2 which 919has the source.</p> 920 921<p>In addition to being a bit like a command shell, the nash man page lists the 922following commands:</p> 923 924<blockquote><p> 925access echo find losetup mkdevices mkdir mknod mkdmnod mkrootdev mount 926pivot_root readlink raidautorun setquiet showlabels sleep switchroot umount 927</p></blockquote> 928 929<p>Oddly, the only occurrence of the string pivot_root in the nash source code 930is in the man page, the command isn't there. (It seems to have been removed 931when the underscoreless switchroot went in.)</p> 932 933<p>A more complete list seems to be the handlers[] array in nash.c:</p> 934 935<blockquote><p> 936access buildEnv cat cond cp daemonize dm echo exec exit find kernelopt 937loadDrivers loadpolicy mkchardevs mkblktab mkblkdevs mkdir mkdmnod mknod 938mkrootdev mount netname network null plymouth hotplug killplug losetup 939ln ls raidautorun readlink resume resolveDevice rmparts setDeviceEnv 940setquiet setuproot showelfinterp showlabels sleep stabilized status switchroot 941umount waitdev 942</p></blockquote> 943 944<p>This list is nuts: "plymouth" is an alias for "null" which is basically 945"true" (which the above list doesn't have). Things like buildEnv and 946loadDrivers are bespoke Red Hat behavior that might as well be hardwired in 947to nash's main() without being called.</p> 948 949<p>Instead of eliminating items 950from the list with an explanation for each, I'm just going to cherry pick 951a few: the device mapper (dm, raidautorun) is probably interesting, 952hotplug (may be obsolete due to kernel changes that now load firmware 953directly), and another "resume" ala klibc.</p> 954 955<p>But mostly: I don't care about this one. And neither does Red Hat anymore.</p> 956 957<p>Verdict: ignore</p> 958 959<hr /> 960<a name=beastiebox /> 961<h2>Beastiebox</h2> 962 963<p>Back in 2008, the BSD guys vented some busybox-envy 964<a href=http://beastiebox.sourceforge.net>on sourceforge</a>. Then stopped. 965Their repository is still in CVS, hasn't been touched in years, it's a giant 966hairball of existing code sucked together. (The web page says the author 967is aware of crunchgen, but decided to do this by hand anyway. This is not 968a collection of new code, it's a katamari of existing code rolled up in a 969ball.)</p> 970 971<p>Combining the set of commands listed on the web page with the set of 972man pages in the source gives us:</P> 973 974<blockquote><p> 975[ cat chmod cp csh date df disklabel dmesg echo ex fdisk fsck fsck_ffs getty 976halt hostname ifconfig init kill less lesskey ln login ls lv mksh more mount 977mount_ffs mv pfctl ping poweroff ps reboot rm route sed sh stty sysctl tar test 978traceroute umount vi wiconfig 979</p></blockquote> 980 981<p>Apparently lv is the missing link between ed and vi, copyright 1982-1997 (do 982not want), ex is another obsolete vi mode, lesskey is "used to 983specify a set of key bindings to be used with less", and csh is a shell they 984sucked in (even though they have mksh?), [ is an alias for test. Several more bsd-isms that don't have Linux 985equivalents (even in the ubuntu "install this package" search) are 986disklabel, fsck_ffs, mount_ffs, and pfctl. And wiconfig is a 987wavelan interface network card driver utility. Subtracting all that and the 988commands toybox already implements at triage time, we get:</p> 989 990<blockquote><p> 991<span id=beastiebox_cmd> 992fdisk fsck getty halt ifconfig init kill less more mount mv ping poweroff 993ps reboot route sed sh stty sysctl tar test traceroute umount vi 994</span> 995</p></blockquote> 996 997<p>Not a hugely interesting list, but eh.</p> 998 999<p>Verdict: ignore</p> 1000
1001<hr /> 1002<a name=BsdBox /> 1003<h2>BsdBox</h2> 1004 1005<p>Somebody decided to do a <a href=https://wiki.freebsd.org/AdrianChadd/BsdBox>multicall binary for freebsd</a>.</p> 1006 1007<p>They based it on crunchgen, a tool that glues existing programs together 1008into an archive and uses the name to execute the right one. It has no 1009simplification or code sharing benefits whatsoever, it's basically an 1010archiver that produces executables.</p> 1011 1012<p>That's about where I stopped reading.</p> 1013 1014<p>Verdict: ignore.</p> 1015 1016<hr /> 1017<a name=slowaris /> 1018<h2>OpenSolaris Busybox</h2> 1019 1020<p>Somebody <a href=http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+busybox/>wrote 1021a wiki page</a> saying that Busybox for OpenSolaris would be a good idea.</p> 1022 1023<p>The corresponding "files" tab is an auto-generated stub. The project never 1024even got as far as suggesting commands to include before Oracle discontinued 1025OpenSolaris.</p> 1026 1027<p>Verdict: ignore.</p> 1028 1029<hr /> 1030<a name=uclinux /> 1031<h2>uClinux</h2> 1032 1033<p>Long ago a hardware developer named Jeff Dionne put together a 1034nommu Linux distribution, which involved rewriting a lot of command line 1035utilities that relied on <a href=http://nommu.org/memory-faq.txt>features 1036unavailable on nommu</a> hardware.</p> 1037 1038<p>In 2003 Jeff moved to Japan and handed 1039the project off to people who allowed it to roll to a stop. The website 1040turned into a mess of 404 links, the navigation indexes stopped being 1041updated over a decade ago, and the project's CVS repository suffered a 1042hard drive failure for which there were no backups. The project continued 1043to put out "releases" through 2014 (you have to scroll down in the "news" 1044section to find them, the "HTTP download" section in the nav bar on the 1045left hasn't been updated in over a decade), which were hand-updated tarball 1046snapshots mostly consisting of software from the 1990's. For example the 10472014 release still contained ipfwadm, the package which predated ipchains, 1048which predated iptables, which is in the process of being replaced by 1049nftables.</p> 1050 1051<p>Nevertheless, people still try to use this because the project was viewed 1052as the place to discuss, develop, and learn about nommu Linux. 1053The role of uclinux.org as an educational resource kept people coming 1054to it long after it had collapsed as a Linux distro.</p> 1055 1056<p>Starting around 0.6.0 toybox began to address nommu support with the goal 1057of putting uClinux out of its misery.</p> 1058 1059<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 1060subdirectories under "user".</p> 1061 1062<h3>Taking out the trash</h3> 1063 1064<p>A bunch of packages (<b>inotify-tools, input-event-demon, ipsec-tools, netifd, 1065keepalived, mobile-broadband-provider-info, nuttp, readline, snort, 1066snort-barnyard, socat, sqlite, sysklogd, sysstat, tcl, ubus, uci, udev, 1067unionfs, uqmi, usb_modeswitch, usbutils, util-linux</b>) 1068are hard to evaluate because 1069uclinux has directories for them, but their source isn't actually in the 1070uclinux tree. In some of these the makefiles download a git repo during 1071the build, so I'm assuming you can build the external package if you really 1072care. (Even when I know what these packages do, I'm skipping them 1073because uclinux doesn't actually contain them, and any given snapshot 1074of the build system will bitrot as external web links change over time.)</p> 1075 1076<p>Other packages are orphaned, meaning they're not mentioned from any Kconfig 1077or Makefiles outside of their directory, so uclinux can't actually build 1078them: <b>mbus</b> is an orphaned i2c test program expecting to run in some sort 1079of hardwired hardware context, <b>mkeccbin</b> is an orphaned "ECC annotated 1080binary file" generator (meaning it's half of a flash writer), 1081<b>wsc_upnp</b> is a "Ralink WPS" driver (some sort of stale wifi chip)...</p> 1082 1083<p>The majority of the remaining packages are probably not of interest to 1084toybox due to being so obsolete or special purpose they may not actually be 1085of interest to anybody anymore. (This list also includes a lot of 1086special-purpose network back-end stuff that's hard for anybody but 1087datacenter admins to evaluate the current relevance of.)</p> 1088 1089<blockquote><b><p> 1090arj asterisk boottools bpalogin br2684ctl camserv can4linux cgi_generic 1091cgihtml clamav clamsmtp conntrack-tools cramfs crypto-tools cxxtest 1092ddns3-client de2ts-cal debug demo diald discard dnsmasq dnsmasq2 1093ethattach expat-examples ez-ipupdate fakeidentd 1094fconfig ferret flatfs flthdr freeradius freeswan frob-led frox fswcert 1095game gettyd gnugk haserl horch 1096hostap hping httptunnel ifattach ipchains 1097ipfwadm ipmasqadm ipportfw ipredir ipset iso_client 1098jamvm jffs-tools jpegview jquery-ui kendin-config kismet klaxon kmod 1099l2tpd lcd ledcmd ledcon lha lilo lirc lissa load loattach 1100lpr lrpstat lrzsz mail mbus mgetty microwin ModemManager msntp musicbox 1101nooom null openswan openvpn palmbot pam_* pcmcia-cs playrt plugdaemon pop3proxy 1102potrace qspitest quagga radauth 1103ramimage readprofile rdate readprofile routed rrdtool rtc-ds1302 1104sendip ser sethdlc setmac setserial sgutool sigs siproxd slattach 1105smtpclient snmpd net-snmp snortrules speedtouch squashfs scep sslwrap stp 1106stunnel tcpblast tcpdump tcpwrappers threaddemos tinylogin tinyproxy 1107tpt tripwire unrar unzoo version vpnled w3cam xl2tpd zebra 1108</p></b></blockquote> 1109 1110<p>This stuff is all over the place: arj, lha, rar, and zoo are DOS archivers, 1111ethattach describes itself as just "a network tool", 1112mail is a textmode smtp mailer literally described as "Some kind of mail 1113proggy" in uclinux's kconfig (as opposed to clamsmtp and smtpclient and 1114so on), this gettyd isn't a generic version but specifically a 1115hardwired ppp dialin utility, mgetty isn't a generic version but is combined 1116with "sendfax", hostap is an intersil prism driver, wlan-ng is also an 1117intersil prism dirver, null is a program to intentionally dereference a 1118null pointer (in case you needed one), iso_client is a 1119"Demo Application for the USB Device Driver", kendin-config is 1120"for configuring the Micrel Kendin KS8995M over QSPI", speedtouch configures 1121a specific brand of asdl modem, portmap is part of Anfs, 1122ferret, linux-igd, and miniupnp are all upnp packages, 1123lanbypass "can be used to control the LAN 1124bypass switches on the Advantech x86 based hardware platforms", lcd is 1125"test of lcddma device driver" (an out-of-tree Coldfire driver apparently 1126lost to history, the uclinux linux-2.4.x directory has a config symbol for 1127it, but nothing in the code actually _uses_ it...), qspitest is another 1128coldfire thing, mii-tool-fec is 1129"strictly for the FEC Ethernet driver as implemented (and modified) for 1130the uCdimm5272", rtc-ds1302 and rtc-m41t11 are usermode drivers for specific 1131clock chips, stunnel is basically "openssl s_client -quiet -connect", 1132potrace is a bitmap to vector graphic converter, radauth performs command line 1133authentication against a radius server, 1134clamav, klaxon, ferret, l7-protocols, and nessus are very old network security 1135software (it's got a stale snapshot of nmap too), xl2tpd is a PPP over UDP 1136tunnel (rfc 2661), zebra is the package quagga replaced, 1137lilo is the x86-only bootloader that predated grub (and recently discontinued 1138development), lissa is a "framebuffer graphics demo" from 11391998, the squashfs package here is the out of tree patches for 2.4 kernels 1140and such before the filesystem was merged upstream (as opposed to the 1141squashfs-new package which is a snapshot of the userspace tool from 2011), 1142load is basically "dd file /dev/spi", version is basically "cat /proc/version", 1143microwin is a port of the WinCE graphics API to Linux, scep is a 2003 1144implementation of an IETF draft abandoned in 2010, tpt depends on 1145Andrew Morton's 15 year old unmerged "timepegs" kernel patch using the pentium 1146cycle counter, vpnled controls a light that reboots systems (what?), 1147w3cam is a video4linux 1.0 client (v4l2 showed up during 2.5 and support for 1148the old v4l1 was removed in 2.6.38 back in 2011), busybox ate tinylogin 1149over a decade ago, lrpstat is a java network monitor 1150from 2001, lrzsz is zmodem/ymodem/zmodem, msntp and stp implement rfc2030 1151meaning it overflows in 2036 (the package was last updated in 2000), rdate 1152is rfc 868 meaning it also overflows in 2036 (which is why ntp was invented 1153a few decades back), reiserfsprogs development stopped abruptly after 1154Hans Reiser was convicted of murdering his wife Nina (denying it on the 1155stand and then leading them to the body as part of his plea bargain during 1156sentencing)... 1157</p> 1158 1159<p>Seriously, there's a lot of crap in there. It's hard to analyze most 1160of it far enough to prove it _doesn't_ do anything.</p> 1161 1162<h3>Non-toybox programs</h3> 1163 1164<p>The following software may actually still do something intelligible 1165(although the package versions tend to be years out of date), but 1166it's not a direction toybox has chosen to go in.</p> 1167 1168<p>There are several programming languages (<b>bash, lua, jamvm, tinytcl, 1169perl, python</b>) in there. Maybe someone somewhere wants a 2008 release of a 1170java virtual machine tested to work on nommu systems (jamvm), but it's out 1171of scope for toybox.</p> 1172 1173<p>A bunch of benchmark programs: <b>cpu, dhrystone, mathtest, nbench, netperf, 1174netpipe, and whetstone</b>.</p> 1175 1176<p>A bunch of web servers: <b>appWeb, boa, fnord (via tcpserver), goahead, httpd, 1177mini_httpd, and thttpd</b>.</p> 1178 1179<p>A bunch of shells: <b>msh</b> is a clever (I.E. obfuscated) little shell, 1180<b>nwsh</b> is "new shell" (that's what it called itself in 1999 anyway), 1181<b>sash</b> is another shell with a bunch of builtins (ls, ps, df, cp, date, reboot, 1182and shutdown, this roadmap analyzes it <a href="#sash">elsewhere</a>), 1183<b>sh</b> is a very old minix shell fork, and <b>tcsh</b> is also a shell.</p> 1184 1185<p>Also in this category, we have:</p> 1186 1187<blockquote><b><p> 1188dropbear jffs-tools jpegview kexec-tools bind ctorrent 1189iperf iproute2 ip-sentinel iptables kexec 1190nmap oggplay openssl oprofile p7zip pppd pptp play vplay 1191hdparm mp3play at clock 1192mtd-utils mysql logrotate brcfg bridge-utils flashw 1193ebtables etherwake ethtool expect gdb gdbserver hostapd 1194lm_sensors load netflash netstat-nat 1195radvd recover rootloader resolveip rp-pppoe 1196rsyslog rsyslogd samba smbmount squashfs-new squid ssh strace tip 1197uboot-envtools ulogd usbhubctrl vconfig vixie-cron watchdogd 1198wireless_tools wpa_supplicant 1199</p></b></blockquote> 1200 1201<p>An awful lot of those are borderline: play and vplay are wav file 1202audio players, there's oprofile _and_ readprofile (which just reads kernel 1203profiling data from /proc/profile), 1204radvd is a "routr advertisement daemon" (ipv6 stateless autoconf), 1205ctorrent is a bittorent client, 1206lm_sensors is hardware (heat?) monitoring, 1207resolveip is dig only less so, 1208rp-pppoe is ppp over ethernet, 1209ebtables is an ethernet version of iptables (for bridging), 1210their dropbear is from 2012, and that ssh version is from 2011 1211(which means it's about nine months too _old_ to have the heartbleed bug). 1212There's both ulogd and ulogd2 (no idea why), and pppd is version 2.4 but 1213there's a ppd-2.3 directory also. We used to be interested in ftpd/proftpd 1214as a way of uploading files out of a vm, but support for that has waned 1215over the years and there are lots of alternatives.</p> 1216 1217<p>Lots of flash stuff: 1218flashw is a flash writer, load is an spi flash loader, netflash writes 1219to flash via tftp, 1220recover is also a reflash daemon intended to come up when the system can't boot, 1221rootloader seems to be another reflash daemon but without dhcp.</p> 1222 1223<h3>Already in roadmap</h3> 1224 1225<p>The following packages contain commands already in the toybox roadmap:</p> 1226 1227<blockquote><b><p> 1228agetty cal cksum cron dhcpcd dhcpcd-new dhcpd dhcp-isc dosfstools e2fsprogs 1229elvis-tiny levee fdisk fileutils ftp grep hd hwclock inetd init ntp 1230iputils login module-init-tools netcat shutils ntpdate lspci ping procps 1231rsync shadow shutils stty sysutils telnet telnetd tftp tftpd traceroute 1232unzip wget mawk net-tools 1233</p></b></blockquote> 1234 1235<p>There are some duplicates in there, levee is a tiny vi implementation 1236like elvis-tiny, ntp and ntpdate overlap, etc.</p> 1237 1238<p>Verdict: We don't really need to do a whole lot special for nommu 1239systems, just get the existing toybox roadmap working on nommu and 1240we're good. The uClinux project can rest in peace.</p> 1241 1242<hr /> 1243<h2>Requests:</h2> 1244 1245<p>The following additional commands have been requested (and often submitted) 1246by various users. I _really_ need to clean up this section.</p> 1247 1248<p>Also:</p> 1249<blockquote><b> 1250<span id=request> 1251dig freeramdisk getty halt hexdump hwclock klogd modprobe ping ping6 pivot_root 1252poweroff readahead rev sfdisk sudo syslogd taskset telnet telnetd tracepath 1253traceroute unzip usleep vconfig zip free login modinfo unshare netcat help w 1254iwconfig iwlist rdate 1255dos2unix unix2dos clear 1256pmap realpath setsid timeout truncate 1257mkswap swapon swapoff 1258count oneit fstype 1259acpi blkid eject pwdx 1260sulogin rfkill bootchartd 1261arp makedevs sysctl killall5 crond crontab deluser last mkpasswd watch 1262blockdev rpm2cpio arping brctl dumpleases fsck 1263tcpsvd tftpd 1264factor fallocate fsfreeze inotifyd lspci nbd-client partprobe strings 1265base32 base64 mix 1266reset hexedit nsenter shred 1267fsync insmod ionice lsmod lsusb rmmod vmstat xxd top iotop 1268lsof ionice compress dhcp dhcpd addgroup delgroup host iconv ip 1269ipcrm ipcs netstat openvt 1270deallocvt iorenice 1271udpsvd adduser 1272microcom tunctl chrt getfattr setfattr 1273kexec 1274ascii crc32 devmem fmt i2cdetect i2cdump i2cget i2cset i2ctransfer mcookie prlimit sntp ulimit uuidgen dhcp6 ipaddr iplink iproute iprule iptunnel cd exit toysh bash traceroute6 1275blkdiscard rtcwake 1276watchdog 1277pwgen readelf unicode 1278rsync 1279linux32 hd strace 1280gpiodetect gpiofind gpioget gpioinfo gpioset httpd uclampset 1281nbd-server 1282memeater 1283</span> 1284</b></blockquote> 1285 1286<hr /> 1287<a name=packages /> 1288<h2>Other packages</h2> 1289 1290<p>System administrators have <a href=https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/168#issuecomment-583725500>asked</a> what other Linux packages toybox commands 1291replace, so they can annotate alternatives in their package management system.</p> 1292 1293<p>This section uses the package definitions from Chapter 6 of 1294<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 1295replace, pending commands [in square brackets], and what we DON'T plan to 1296implement.</p> 1297 1298<p>Each "see also" note means the listed package also installs the listed shared 1299libraries. (While toybox contains equivalent functionality to a lot of these 1300shared libraries in its lib/ directory, it does not currently provide a shared 1301library interface.)</p> 1302 1303<h3>Packages toybox plans to provide complete-ish replacements for:</h3> 1304<ul> 1305<li><b>file</b>: file (see also: libmagic)</li> 1306<li><b>m4</b>: [m4]</li> 1307<li><b>bc</b>: [bc] [dc]</li> 1308<li><b>bison</b>: [yacc] (not: bison, see also: liby)</li> 1309<li><b>flex</b>: [lex] (not: flex flex++, see also: libfl)</li> 1310<li><b>make</b>: [make]</li> 1311<li><b>sed</b>: sed</li> 1312<li><b>grep</b>: grep egrep fgrep</li> 1313<li><b>bash</b>: bash sh (not: bashbug)</li> 1314<li><b>diffutils</b>: cmp [diff] [diff3] [sdiff]</li> 1315<li><b>gawk</b>: [awk] (not: gawk gawk-5.0.1)</li> 1316<li><b>findutils</b>: find xargs (not: locate updatedb)</li> 1317<li><b>less</b>: less (not: lessecho lesskey)</li> 1318<li><b>gzip</b>: zcat [gzip] [gunzip] [zcmp] [zdiff] [zegrep] [zfgrep] [zgrep] [zless] [zmore] 1319(not: gzexe uncompress zforce znew)</li> 1320<li><b>patch</b>: patch</li> 1321<li><b>tar</b>: tar</li> 1322<li><b>procps-ng</b>: free pgrep pidof pkill ps sysctl top uptime vmstat w watch 1323[pmap] [pwdx] [slabtop] 1324(not: tload, see also libprocps)</li> 1325<li><b>sysklogd</b>: [klogd] [syslogd]</li> 1326<li><b>sysvinit</b>: [init] halt poweroff reboot killall5 [shutdown] 1327(not telinit runlevel fstab-decode bootlogd)</li> 1328<li><b>man</b>: man (but not accessdb apropos catman lexgrog mandb manpath whatis, 1329see also libman libmandb)</li> 1330<li><b>vim</b>: vi xxd (but not ex, rview, rvim, view, vim, vimdiff, vimtutor)</li> 1331<li><b>sysvinit</b>: [init] halt poweroff reboot killall5 [shutdown] 1332(not telinit runlevel fstab-decode bootlogd)</li> 1333<li><b>kmod</b>: insmod lsmod rmmod modinfo [modprobe] 1334(not: depmod kmod)</li> 1335<li><b>attr</b>: [getfattr] setfattr (not: attr, see also: libattr)</li> 1336<li><b>shadow</b>: [chfn] [chpasswd] [chsh] [groupadd] [groupdel] [groupmod] 1337[newusers] passwd [su] [useradd] [userdel] [usermod] 1338[lastlog] [login] [newgidmap] [newuidmap] 1339(not: chage expiry faillog groupmems grpck logoutd newgrp nologin pwck sg 1340vigr vipw, grpconv grpunconv pwconv pwunconv, chgpasswd gpasswd)</li> 1341<li><b>psmisc</b>: killall [fuser] [pstree] [peekfd] [prtstat] 1342(not: pslog pstree.x11)</li> 1343<li><b>inetutils</b>: dnsdomainname [ftp] hostname ifconfig ping ping6 [telnet] [tftp] [traceroute] (not: talk)</li> 1344<li><b>coreutils</b>: [ base32 base64 basename cat chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum comm cp cut date 1345dd df dirname du echo env expand factor false fmt fold groups head hostid id install 1346link ln logname ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mknod mktemp mv nice nl nohup nproc od 1347paste printenv printf pwd readlink realpath rm rmdir seq sha1sum shred 1348sleep sort split stat sync tac tail tee test timeout touch true truncate 1349tty uname uniq unlink wc who whoami yes 1350[expr] [fold] [join] [numfmt] [runcon] [sha224sum] [sha256sum] [sha384sum] 1351[sha512sum] [stty] [b2sum] [tr] [unexpand] 1352(not: basenc chcon csplit dir dircolors pathchk 1353pinky pr ptx shuf stdbuf sum tsort users vdir, see also libstdbuf)</li> 1354<li><b>util-linux</b>: blkid blockdev cal chrt dmesg eject fallocate flock hwclock 1355ionice kill logger losetup mcookie mkswap more mount mountpoint nsenter 1356pivot_root prlimit rename renice rev setsid swapoff swapon switch_root taskset 1357umount unshare uuidgen 1358[addpart] [fdisk] [findfs] [findmnt] [fsck] [fsfreeze] [fstrim] [getopt] 1359[hexdump] [linux32] [linux64] [lsblk] [lscpu] [lsns] [setarch] 1360(not: agetty blkdiscard blkzone cfdisk chcpu chmem choom col 1361colcrt colrm column ctrlaltdel delpart fdformat fincore fsck.cramfs 1362fsck.minix ipcmk ipcrm ipcs isosize last lastb ldattach look lsipc 1363lslocks lslogins lsmem mesg mkfs mkfs.bfs mkfs.cramfs mkfs.minix namei partx 1364raw readprofile resizepart rfkill rtcwake script scriptreplay 1365setterm sfdisk sulogin swaplabel ul 1366uname26 utmpdump uuidd uuidparse wall wdctl whereis wipefs 1367i386 x86_64 zramctl)</li> 1368</ul> 1369 1370<p>Commentary: toybox init doesn't do runlevels, man and vim are just the 1371relevant commands without the piles of strange overgrowth, and if you want 1372to call a toybox binary by another name you can create a symlink to a 1373symlink. If somebody really wants to argue for "gzexe" or similar, be 1374my guest, but there's a lot of obsolete crap in shadow, coreutils, 1375util-linux...</p> 1376 1377<p>No idea why LFS is installing inetutils instead of net-tools 1378(which contains arp route ifconfig mii-tool nameif netstat and rarp that 1379toybox does or might implement, and plipconfig slattach that it probably won't.)</p> 1380 1381<h3>Packages toybox plans to provide partial replacements for:</h3> 1382 1383<p>Toybox provides replacements for some binaries from these packages, 1384but there are other useful binaries which this package provides that toybox 1385currently considers out of scope for the project:</p> 1386 1387<ul> 1388<li><b>binutils</b>: strings [ar] [nm] [readelf] [size] [objcopy] [strip] 1389(not c++filt, dwp, elfedit, gprof. The following commands belong 1390in <a href=/code/qcc>qcc</a>: addr2line as ld objdump ranlib)</li> 1391<li><b>bzip2</b>: bunzip2 bzcat [bzcmp] [bzdiff] [bzegrep] [bzfgrep] [bzgrep] [bzless] 1392[bzmore] (not: bzip2, bzip2recover, see also libbz2)</li> 1393<li><b>xz</b>: [xzcat] [lzcat] [lzcmp] [lzdiff] [lzegrep] [lzfgrep] [lzgrep] 1394[lzless] [lzmadec, lzmainfo] [lzmore] [unlzma] [unxz] [xzcat] 1395[xzcmp] [xzdec] [xzdiff] [xzegrep] [xzfgrep] [xzgrep] [xzless] [xzmore] 1396(not: compression side, see also: liblzma)</li> 1397<li><b>ncurses</b>: clear reset (not: everything else, see also: libcurses)</li> 1398<li><b>e2fsprogs</b>: chattr lsattr [e2fsck] [mkfs.ext2] [mkfs.ext3] 1399[fsck.ext2] [fsck.ext3] [e2label] [resize2fs] [tune2fs] 1400(not badblocks compile_et debugfs dumpe2fse2freefrag e2image 1401e2mmpstatus e2scrub e2scrub_all e2undo e4crypt e4defrag filefrag 1402fsck.ext4 logsave mk_cmds mkfs.ext4 mklost+found)</li> 1403</ul> 1404 1405<p>Toybox provides several decompressors but compresses to a single format 1406(deflate, ala gzip/zlib). Our e2fsprogs doesn't currently plan to support 1407ext4 or defrag. The "qcc" reference is because someday an external project to glue 1408QEMU's <a href=https://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=blob;f=tcg/README;h=bfa2e4ed246c;hb=HEAD>Tiny Code Generator</a> 1409to Fabrice Bellard's old <a href=http://landley.net/hg/tinycc>Tiny C Compiler</a> 1410making a multicall binary that does cc/ld/as for all the targets QEMU 1411supports (then use the 1412<a href=https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe>LLVM C Backend</a> 1413to compile LLVM itself to C for use as a modern replacement for 1414<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront>cfront</a> to bootstrap 1415C++ code) is under consideration 1416as a successor project to toybox. Until then things like objdump -d 1417(requiring target-specific disassembly for an unbounded number of architectures) 1418are out of scope for toybox. (This means drawing the line somewhere between 1419architecture-specific support in file and strace, and including a full 1420assembler for each architecture.)</p> 1421</span> 1422 1423<h3>Packages from LFS ch6 toybox does NOT plan to replace:</h3> 1424 1425<blockquote><p><b> 1426linux-api-headers man-pages glibc zlib readline gmp mpfr mpc gcc pkg-config 1427ncurses acl libcap psmisc iana-etc libtool gdbm gperf expat perl XML::Parser 1428intltool autoconf automake gettext libelf libffi openssl python ninja meson 1429check groff grub libpipeline texinfo 1430</b></p></blockquote> 1431 1432<p>That said, we do implement our own zlib and readline replacements, and 1433presumably _could_ export them as library bindings. Plus we provide 1434our own version of a bunch of the section 1 man pages (as command help). 1435Possibly libcap and acl are interesting?</p> 1436 1437<h3>Misc</h3> 1438 1439<p>The kbd package has over a dozen commands, we only implement chvt. The 1440iproute2 package implements over a dozen commands, there's an "ip" in 1441pending but I'm not a fan (ifconfig and route and such should be extended 1442to work properly). We don't implement eudev, but toybox's maintainer 1443created busybox mdev way back when (which replaces it) and plans to do a 1444new one for toybox as soon as we work out what subset is still needed now that 1445devtmpfs is available.</p> 1446 1447<hr /><a name=todo /><h2>TODO list</h2> 1448 1449<ul> 1450<li><p>Fill out "development" command list (finish toysh, implement awk, etc.)</p></li> 1451 1452<p><li>Handle "pending" directory. 1453<ul> 1454<li>Cleanup and promote the "pending" commands used to run mkroot.</li> 1455<ul><li>Enabled by $PENDING in mkroot.sh (sh route)</li></ul> 1456 1457<li>Cleanup and promote the "pending" commands used to build mkroot.</li> 1458<ul><li>In scripts/install.sh the $PENDING list symlinked from the host $PATH 1459into "make airlock" directory (expr git tr bash sh gzip awk bison flex make).</li></ul> 1460<li>Cleanup and promote all $PENDING commands used by android 1461<ul><li><b>grep pending Android.bp</b> 1462in <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/toybox>their repo</a> 1463(diff expr tr brctl getfattr lsof modprobe more stty traceroute vi)</li></ul> 1464</li> 1465 1466<li>Cleanup/promote/delete remaining "pending" commands</li> 1467<ul><li>Once empty, remove toys/pending and maybe collape together other 1468directories into just toys/*.c (with "default n" meaning examples, and 1469a "posix_defconfig" target alongside macos/bsd/android).</li></ul> 1470 1471</ul></li></p> 1472 1473<li><p>Replace kconfig/ with a new implementation (menu/def/yes/no/old).</p></li> 1474 1475<p><li>Automate Linux From Scratch build. 1476<ul> 1477 1478<li>Automate the <a href=https://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/downloads/stable/LFS-BOOK-12.0-NOCHUNKS.html>existing build</a> 1479<ul> 1480<li>create chroot directory from host (chapters 4-6)</li> 1481<li>setup/launch chroot directory (start of chapter 7)</li> 1482<li>build in chroot directory (chapters 7-10)</li> 1483</ul> 1484</li> 1485 1486<li>Add record-commands support (both inside and outside chroot)</li> 1487<li>Build host->chroot part with PATH=$PWD/airlock (moving one command over at a time) 1488<ul><li>Set up native compiler, enumerate/build/install "temp stuff" toybox 1489doesn't provide yet (make, busybox commands, etc).</li></ul> 1490</li> 1491 1492<li>Run host->chroot build under mkroot, with airlock built+packaged for 1493target (toybox, native compiler, temp stuff from busybox or "make")</li> 1494<li>Run chroot build to completion in chroot under mkroot (kernel etc smoketest)</li> 1495<li>Run chroot build outside chroot (keeping toybox at start of $PATH) 1496to prove toybox commands sufficient to build ALL packages</li> 1497<li>Package LFS build (mkroot/packages/lfs) 1498 1499<ul> 1500<li>host/chroot/target build scripts</li> 1501<li><a href=http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/lfs/lfs-packages/>download</a> and 1502setup packages.</li> 1503<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> 1504</li> 1505</ul> 1506 1507</ul></p> 1508 1509<li><p>1.0 release</p></li> 1510 1511<li><p>Tackle AOSP build.</p></li> 1512</ul> 1513 1514<!-- #include "footer.html" --> 1515 1516