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1<html><head><title>toybox roadmap</title>
2<!--#include file="header.html" -->
3<title>Toybox Roadmap</title>
4
5<h2>Goals and use cases</h2>
6
7<p>We have several potential use cases for a new set of command line
8utilities, and are using those to determine which commands to implement
9for Toybox's 1.0 release. (Most of these have their own section in the
10<a href=status.html>status page</a>.)</p>
11
12<p>The most interesting publicly available standards are POSIX-2008
13(also known as the Single
14Unix Specification version 4) and the Linux Standard Base (version 4.1).
15The main test harness is including toybox in <a href=https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> and if that can
16build itself using the result to <a href=https://github.com/landley/control-images>build Linux From Scratch</a> (version 6.8).
17We also aim to replace Android's Toolbox.</p>
18
19<p>At a secondary level we'd like to meet other use cases. We've analyzed
20the commands provided by similar projects (klibc, sash, sbase, embutils,
21nash, and beastiebox), along with various vendor configurations of busybox,
22and some end user requests.</p>
23
24<p>Finally, we'd like to provide a good replacement for the Bash shell,
25which was the first program Linux ever ran and remains the standard shell
26of Linux no matter what Ubuntu says. This doesn't mean including the full
27set of Bash 4.x functionality, but does involve {various,features} &lt(beyond)
28posix.</p>
29
30<p>See the <a href=status.html>status page</a> for the combined list
31and progress towards implementing it.</p>
32
33<ul>
34<li><a href=#susv4>POSIX-2008/SUSv4</a></li>
35<li><a href=#sigh>Linux "Standard" Base</a></li>
36<li><a href=#dev_env>Development Environment</a></li>
37<li><a href=#android>Android Toolbox</a></li>
38<li><a href=#aosp>Building AOSP</a></li>
39<li><a href=#tizen>Tizen Core</a></li>
40<li><a href=#buildroot>buildroot</a></li>
41<li>Miscelaneous: <a href=#klibc>klibc</a>, <a href=#glibc>glibc</a>,
42<a href=#sash>sash</a>, <a href=#sbase>sbase</a>,
43<a href=#uclinux>uclinux</a>...</li>
44</ul>
45
46<hr />
47<a name="standards">
48<h2>Use case: standards compliance.</h2>
49
50<h3><a name=susv4 /><a href="#susv4">POSIX-2008/SUSv4</a></h3>
51<p>The best standards describe reality rather than attempting to impose a
52new one. A good standard should document, not legislate.
53Standards which document existing reality tend to be approved by
54more than one standards body, such ANSI and ISO both approving C. That's why
55the IEEE POSIX committee's 2008 standard, the Single Unix Specification version
564, and the Open Group Base Specification edition 7 are all the same standard
57from three sources, but most people just call it "posix" (portable operating
58system derived from unix). It's available <a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799>online in full</a>, and may be downloaded as a tarball...
59with a caveat.</p>
60
61<p>Although previous versions of Posix have their own
62stable URLs (where you can still find
63<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/>SUSv3</a> and
64<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7990989775/>SUSv2</a>),
65the 2008 release of SUSv4 was replaced by a 2013 release also claiming
66to be SUSv4, then again by a 2018 release still at the same URL. Similarly,
67the other version numbers claim not to have changed, but instead adopted some
68sort of "Windows 95" naming scheme ("The Open Group Base Specifications Issue
697, 2018 edition"). Since a moving target isn't a standard, we've stuck
70with the 2008 version and ignored whatever changes they make
71until they stop this forced-upgrade-behind-your back nonsense.
72Luckily you can still find the original content
73<a href=https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition/>here</a>.
74(We haven't changed the URLs in each command to the longer version yet,
75but can if conflicts arise.)</p>
76
77<h3>Why not just use posix for everything?</h3>
78
79<p>Unfortunately posix describes an incomplete subset of reality,
80lacking any mention of commands such as init or mount required to
81actually boot a system. It describes logname but not login. It provides ipcrm
82and ipcs, but not ipcmk, so you can use System V IPC resources but not create
83them. And widely used real-world commands such as tar and cpio (the basis
84of initramfs and RPM) which were present in earlier
85versions of the standard have been removed, while obsolete commands like
86cksum, compress, sccs and uucp remain with no mention of modern counterparts
87like crc32/sha1sum, gzip/xz, svn/git or scp/rsync. Meanwhile the commands
88themselves are missing dozens of features and specify silly things like ebcdic
89support in dd or that wc should use %d (not %lld) for byte counts. So
90we have to extensively filter posix to get a useful set of recommendations.</p>
91
92<p>Starting with the
93<a href="http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2008edition/idx/utilities.html">full "utilities" list</a>,
94we first remove generally obsolete
95commands (compess ed ex pr uncompress uccp uustat uux), commands for the
96pre-CVS "SCCS" source control system (admin delta get prs rmdel sact sccs unget
97val what), fortran support (asa fort77), and batch processing support (batch
98qalter qdel qhold qmove qmsg qrerun qrls qselect qsig qstat qsub).</p>
99
100<p>Some commands are for a compiler toolchain (ar c99 cflow ctags cxref gencat
101iconv lex m4 make nm strings strip tsort yacc), which is outside of toybox's
102mandate and should be supplied externally. (Again, some of these may be
103revisited later, but not for toybox 1.0.)</p>
104
105<p>Some commands are part of a command shell, and can't be implemented as
106separate executables (alias bg cd command fc fg getopts hash jobs kill read
107type ulimit umask unalias wait). These may be revisited as part of a built-in
108toybox shell, but are not exported into $PATH via symlinks. (If you fork a
109child process and have it "cd" then exit, you've accomplished nothing.)
110Again, what posix provides is incomplete: a shell also needs exit, if, while,
111for, case, export, set, unset, trap, exec... (And for bash compatibility
112function, source...)</p>
113
114<p>A few other commands are judgement calls, providing command-line
115internationalization support (iconv locale localedef), System V inter-process
116communication (ipcrm ipcs), and cross-tty communication from the minicomputer
117days (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,
118"mailx" is
119a command line email client, and "lp" submits files for printing to... what
120exactly?  (cups?)  The standard defines crontab but not crond.</p>
121
122<p>Removing all of that leaves the following commands, which toybox should
123implement:</p>
124
125<blockquote><b>
126<span id=posix>
127at awk basename bc cal cat chgrp chmod chown cksum cmp comm cp
128csplit cut date dd df diff dirname du echo env expand expr false file find
129fold fuser getconf grep head id join kill link ln logger logname ls man
130mkdir mkfifo more mv newgrp nice nl nohup od paste patch pathchk printf ps
131pwd renice rm rmdir sed sh sleep sort split stty tabs tail tee test time
132touch tput tr true tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode uuencode vi wc
133who xargs zcat
134</span>
135</b></blockquote>
136
137<h3><a name=sigh /><a href="#sigh">Linux Standard Base</a></h3>
138
139<p>One attempt to supplement POSIX towards an actual usable system was the
140Linux Standard Base. Unfortunately, the quality of this "standard" is
141fairly low.</p>
142
143<p>POSIX allowed its standards process to be compromised
144by leaving things out, thus allowing IBM mainframes and Windows NT to drive
145a truck through the holes and declare themselves compilant. But it means what
146they DID standardize tends to be respected (if sometimes obsolete).</p>
147
148<p>The Linux Standard Base's failure mode is different, they respond to
149pressure by including anything their members pay them enough to promote,
150such as allowing Red Hat to push
151RPM into the standard even though all sorts of distros (Debian, Slackware, Arch,
152Gentoo) don't use it and never will. This means anything in the LSB is
153at best a suggestion: arbitrary portions of this standard are widely
154ignored.</p>
155
156<p>The community perception seems to be that the Linux Standard Base is
157the best standard money can buy, I.E. the Linux Foundation is supported by
158financial donations from large companies and the LSB
159<a href=https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2016/apr/11/lf/>represents the interests
160of those donors</a> more than technical merit. (The Linux Foundation, which
161maintains the LSB, isn't a 501c3. It's a 501c6, the
162same kind of legal entity as the Tobacco Institute and Microsoft's old
163"Don't Copy That Floppy" program.) Debian officially
164<a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/658809>washed its hands of LSB</a> when 5.0
165came out in 2015, and no longer even pretends to support it (which may affect
166Debian derivatives like Ubuntu and Knoppix). Toybox hasn't moved to 5.0 for
167similar reasons.</p>
168
169<p>That said, Posix by itself isn't enough, and this is the next most
170comprehensive standards effort for Linux so far, so we salvage what we can.</p>
171
172<p>The LSB specifies a <a href=http://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/LSB_4.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/cmdbehav.html>list of command line
173utilities</a>:</p>
174
175<blockquote><b>
176ar at awk batch bc chfn chsh col cpio crontab df dmesg du echo egrep
177fgrep file fuser gettext grep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
178gunzip gzip hostname install install_initd ipcrm ipcs killall lpr ls
179lsb_release m4 md5sum mknod mktemp more mount msgfmt newgrp od passwd
180patch pidof remove_initd renice sed sendmail seq sh shutdown su sync
181tar umount useradd userdel usermod xargs zcat
182</b></blockquote>
183
184<p>Where posix specifies one of those commands, LSB's deltas tend to be
185accomodations for broken tool versions which aren't up to date with the
186standard 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>
187for examples.)</p>
188
189<p>Since we've already committed to using our own judgement to skip bits of
190POSIX, and LSB's "judgement" in this regard is purely bug workarounds to declare
191various legacy tool implementations "compliant", this means we're mostly
192interested in the set of LSB tools that aren't mentioned in posix.</p>
193
194<p>Of these, gettext and msgfmt are internationalization, install_initd and
195remove_initd weren't present in Ubuntu 10.04, lpr is out of scope,
196and lsb_release just reports information in /etc/os-release.</p>
197
198<p>This leaves:</p>
199
200<blockquote><b>
201<span id=lsb>
202chfn chsh dmesg egrep fgrep groupadd groupdel groupmod groups
203gunzip gzip hostname install killall md5sum
204mknod mktemp mount passwd pidof sendmail seq shutdown
205su sync tar umount useradd userdel usermod zcat
206</span>
207</b></blockquote>
208
209<h3><a name=rfc /><a href="#rfc">IETF RFCs</a></h3>
210
211<p>Discussion of standards wouldn't be complete without the Internet
212Engineering Task Force's "<a href=https://www.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-index.txt>Request For Comments</a>" collection.</p>
213
214<p>These are more about protocols than commands. The noise level is
215extremely high: there's thousands of RFCs, many describing a proposed idea
216that never took off, and less than 1% of the resulting documents are
217currently relevant to toybox. And the documents are numbered based on the
218order they were received, with no real attempt at coherently indexing
219the result. As with man pages they can be <a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0610.txt>long and complicated</a> or
220<a href=https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951.txt>terse and impenetrable</a>,
221have 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
222they <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.</p>
223
224<p>That said, RFC documents can be useful (especially for networking protocols)
225and the three URL templates the recommended starting files
226for new commands (toys/example/skeleton.c or toys/example/hello.c depending on how much
227plumbing you want to start with) provide point to are posix, lsb, and
228rfc pages.</p>
229
230<hr />
231<a name="dev_env">
232<h2><a href="#dev_env">Use case: provide a self-hosting development environment</a></h2>
233
234<p>The following commands were enough to build the <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html>Aboriginal Linux</a> development
235environment, 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>
236
237<blockquote><b>
238<span id=development>
239bzcat cat cp dirname echo env patch rmdir sha1sum sleep sort sync
240true uname wc which yes zcat
241awk basename chmod chown cmp cut date dd diff
242egrep expr fdisk find grep gzip head hostname id install ln ls
243mkdir mktemp mv od readlink rm sed sh tail tar touch tr uniq
244wget whoami xargs chgrp comm gunzip less logname split
245tee test time bunzip2 chgrp chroot comm cpio dmesg
246dnsdomainname ftpd ftpget ftpput gunzip ifconfig init less
247logname losetup mdev mount mountpoint nc pgrep pkill
248pwd route split stat switch_root tac umount vi
249resize2fs tune2fs fsck.ext2 genext2fs mke2fs xzcat
250</span>
251</b></blockquote>
252
253<p>This use case includes running init scripts and other shell scripts, running
254configure, make, and install in each package, and providing basic command line
255facilities such as a text editor. (It does not include a compiler toolchain or
256C library, those are outside the scope of the toybox project, although mkroot
257has a <a href=https://landley.net/code/qcc>potentialy follow-up project</a>.
258For now we use distro toolchains,
259<a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a>,
260and the Android NDK for build testing.)
261That build system also instaled bash 2.05b as #!/bin/sh and its scripts
262required bash extensions not present in shells such as busybox ash.
263To replace that toysh needs to supply several bash extensions _and_ work
264when called under the name "bash".</p>
265
266<p>The development methodology used a <a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/FAQ.html#debug_logging>command logging wrapper</a>
267that intercepted each command called out of the $PATH and append the
268command line to a log file, then <a href=https://github.com/landley/aboriginal/blob/master/more/report-recorded-commands.sh>analyze</a> the result to create a
269<a href=https://landley.net/notes-2008.html#23-01-2008>list of commands</a>,
270then <a href=https://github.com/landley/aboriginal/blob/master/host-tools.sh>create a directory of symlinks</a> pointing to those commands out of the
271host $PATH. Then the new implementation can replace these commands one
272at a time, checking the results and the log output to spot any behavior
273changes.</p>
274
275<h3>Stages and moving targets</h3>
276
277<p>This use case has two stages: 1) building a bootable system that can
278rebuild itself from source, and 2) a build environment capable
279of bootstrapping up to arbitrary complexity (as exemplified by building
280Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch under the resulting
281system). To accomplish just the first goal, the old build
282still needs the following busybox commands for which toybox does not yet
283supply adequate replacements:</p>
284
285<blockquote><b>
286awk dd diff expr fdisk ftpd gzip less route sh sha512sum tr unxz vi wget xzcat
287</b></blockquote>
288
289<p>All of those except awk, ftpd, and less have partial implementations
290in "pending".</p>
291
292<p>In 2017 Aboriginal Linux development ended, replaced by the
293<a href=https://github.com/landley/mkroot>mkroot</a> project
294designed to use an existing cross+native toolchain (such as
295<a href=https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make>musl-cross-make</a>
296or the Android NDK) instead of building its own. In 2019 the still-incomplete
297mkroot was merged into toybox as the "make root" target. This is intended
298as a simpler way of providing essentially the same build environment, and doesn't
299significantly affect the rest of this analysis (although the "rebuild itself
300from source" test now includes building musl-cross-make under either mkroot
301or toybox's "make airlock" host environment).</p>
302
303<p>Building Linux From Scratch is not the same as building the
304<a href=https://source.android.com>Android Open Source Project</a>,
305but after toybox 1.0 we plan to try
306<a href=http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#hairball>modifying the AOSP build</a>
307to reduce dependencies. (It's fairly likely we'll have to add at least
308a read-only git utility so repo can download the build's source code,
309but that's actually <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7n6G2IL6eo>not
310that hard</a>. We'll probably also need our own "make" at some point after
3111.0, which is its own moving target thanks to cmake and ninja and so on.)
312The ongoing Android <a href=http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2018-January/009330.html>hermetic build</a> work is already advancing
313this goal.</p>
314
315<hr />
316<h2><a name=android /><a href="#android">Use case: Replacing Android Toolbox</a></h2>
317
318<p>Android has a policy against GPL in userspace, so even though BusyBox
319predates Android by many years, they couldn't use it. Instead they grabbed
320an old version of ash (later replaced by
321<a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a>)
322and implemented their own command line utility set
323called "toolbox" (which toybox has already mostly replaced).</p>
324
325<p>Toolbox doesn't have its own repository, instead it's part of Android's
326<a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core>system/core
327git repository</a>. Android's Native Development Kit (their standalone
328downloadable toolchain)  has its own
329<a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/Roadmap.md>roadmap</a>, and each version has
330<a href=https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/revision_history>release
331notes</a>.</p>
332
333<h3>Toolbox commands:</h3>
334
335<p>According to <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/toolbox/Android.bp>
336system/core/toolbox/Android.bp</a> the toolbox directory builds the
337following commands:</p>
338
339<blockquote><b>
340getevent getprop modprobe setprop start
341</b></blockquote>
342
343<p>getprop/setprop/start were in toybox and moved back because they're so
344tied to non-public system interfaces. modprobe shares the implementation
345used in init. getevent probably does make sense as a toybox command, but at the
346moment it's built with a python script that pulls all the constants from the
347latest kernel headers, which is very convenient.</p>
348
349<h3>Other Android /system/bin commands</h3>
350
351<p>Other than the toolbox links, the currently interesting
352binaries in /system/bin are:</p>
353
354<ul>
355<li><b>arping</b> - ARP REQUEST tool (iputils)</li>
356<li><b>blkid</b> - identify block devices (e2fsprogs)</li>
357<li><b>e2fsck</b> - fsck for ext2/ext3/ext4 (e2fsprogs)</li>
358<li><b>fsck.f2fs</b> - fsck for f2fs (f2fs-tools)</li>
359<li><b>fsck_msdos</b> - fsck for FAT (BSD)</li>
360<li><b>gzip</b> - compression/decompression tool (zlib)</li>
361<li><b>ip</b> - network routing tool (iproute2)</li>
362<li><b>iptables/ip6tables</b> - IPv4/IPv6 NAT admin (iptables)</li>
363<li><b>iw</b> - wireless device config tool (iw)</li>
364<li><b>logwrapper</b> - redirect stdio to android log (Android)</li>
365<li><b>make_ext4fs</b> - make ext4 fs (Android)</li>
366<li><b>make_f2fs</b> - make f2fs fs (f2fs-tools)</li>
367<li><b>ping/ping6</b> - ICMP ECHO_REQUEST tool (iputils)</li>
368<li><b>reboot</b> - reboot (Android)</li>
369<li><b>resize2fs</b> - resize ext2/ext3/ext4 fs (e2fsprogs)</li>
370<li><b>sh</b> - mksh (BSD)</li>
371<li><b>ss</b> - socket statistics (iproute2)</li>
372<li><b>tc</b> - traffic control (iproute2)</li>
373<li><b>tracepath/tracepath6</b> - trace network path (iputils)</li>
374<li><b>traceroute/traceroute6</b> - trace network route (iputils)</li>
375</ul>
376
377<p>The names in parentheses are the upstream source of the command.</p>
378
379<h3>Analysis</h3>
380
381<p>For reference, combining everything listed above that's still "fair game"
382for toybox, we get:</p>
383
384<blockquote><b>
385arping blkid e2fsck dd fsck.f2fs fsck_msdos getevent gzip ip iptables
386ip6tables iw logwrapper make_ext4fs make_f2fs modpobe newfs_msdos ping ping6
387reboot resize2fs sh ss tc tracepath tracepath6 traceroute traceroute6
388</b></blockquote>
389
390<p>We may eventually implement all of that, but for toybox 1.0 we need to
391focus a bit. If Android has an acceptable external package, and the command
392isn't needed for system bootstrapping, replacing the external package is
393not a priority.</p>
394
395<p>However, several commands toybox plans to implement anyway could potentially
396replace existing Android versions, so we should take into account Android's use
397cases when doing so. This includes:</p>
398<blockquote><b>
399<span id=toolbox>
400dd getevent gzip modprobe newfs_msdos sh
401</span>
402</b></blockquote>
403
404<p>Update: <a href=https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/system/core/Android.bp>
405external/toybox/Android.bp</a> has symlinks for the following toys out
406of "pending". (The toybox modprobe is also built for the device, but
407it isn't actually used and is only there for sanity checking against
408the libmodprobe-based implementation.) These should be a priority for
409cleanup:</p>
410
411<blockquote><b>
412bc dd diff expr getfattr lsof more stty tr traceroute
413</b></blockquote>
414
415<p>Android wishlist:</p>
416
417<blockquote><b>
418mtools genvfatfs mke2fs gene2fs
419</b></blockquote>
420
421<hr />
422<h2><a name=aosp /><a href="#aosp">Use case: Building AOSP</a></h2>
423
424<p>The list of external tools used to build AOSP was
425<a href="https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/soong/+/master/ui/build/paths/config.go">here</a>,
426but as they're switched over to toybox they disappear and reappear
427<a href="https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/build-tools/+/refs/heads/master/path/linux-x86/">here</a>.</p>
428
429<blockquote><b>
430awk basename bash bc bzip2 cat chmod cmp comm cp cut date dd diff dirname du
431echo egrep env expr find fuser getconf getopt git grep gzip head hexdump
432hostname id jar java javap ln ls lsof m4 make md5sum mkdir mktemp mv od openssl
433paste patch pgrep pkill ps pstree pwd python python2.7 python3 readlink
434realpath rm rmdir rsync sed setsid sh sha1sum sha256sum sha512sum
435sleep sort stat tar tail tee todos touch tr true uname uniq unix2dos unzip
436wc which whoami xargs xxd xz zip zipinfo
437</b></blockquote>
438
439<p>The following are already in the tree and will be used directly:</p>
440
441<blockquote><b>
442awk bzip2 jar java javap m4 make python python2.7 python3 xz
443</b></blockquote>
444
445<p>Subtracting what's already in toybox (including the following toybox toys
446that are still in pending: <code>bc dd diff expr gzip lsof tar tr</code>),
447that leaves:</p>
448
449<blockquote><b>
450bash fuser getopt git hexdump openssl pstree rsync sh todos unzip zip zipinfo
451</b></blockquote>
452
453<p>For AOSP, zip/zipinfo/unzip are likely to be libziparchive based. The
454todos callers will use unix2dos instead if it's available. git/openssl
455seem like they should just be brought in to the tree. rsync is used to
456work around a Mac <code>cp -Rf</code> bug with broken symbolic links. That
457leaves:</p>
458
459<blockquote><b>
460bash fuser getopt hexdump pstree
461</b></blockquote>
462
463<p>(Why are fuser and pstree used during the AOSP build? They're used for
464diagnostics if something goes wrong. So it's really just bash, getopt,
465and hexdump that are actually used to build.)</p>
466
467<hr />
468<h2><a name=tizen /><a href="#tizen">Use case: Tizen Core</a></h2>
469
470<p>The Tizen project has expressed a desire to eliminate GPLv3 software
471from its core system, and is installing toybox as
472<a href=https://wiki.tizen.org/wiki/Toybox>part of this process</a>.</p>
473
474<p>They have a fairly long list of new commands they'd like to see in toybox:</p>
475
476<blockquote><b>
477<span id=tizen>
478arch base64 users dir vdir unexpand shred join csplit
479hostid nproc runcon sha224sum sha256sum sha384sum sha512sum sha3sum mkfs.vfat fsck.vfat
480dosfslabel uname stdbuf pinky diff3 sdiff zcmp zdiff zegrep zfgrep zless zmore
481</span>
482</b></blockquote>
483
484<p>In addition, they'd like to use several commands currently in pending:</p>
485
486<blockquote><b>
487<span id=tizen>
488tar diff printf wget rsync fdisk vi less tr test stty fold expr dd
489</span>
490</b></blockquote>
491
492<p>Also, tizen uses a different Linux Security Module called SMACK, so
493many of the SELinux options ala ls -Z need smack alternatives in an
494if/else setup.</p>
495
496<hr /><a name=buildroot />
497<h2>buildroot:</h2>
498
499<p>The <a href=https://buildroot.org/downloads/manual/manual.html#requirement-mandatory>mandatory packages</a>
500section of the buildroot manual lists:</p>
501
502<blockquote><p>
503which sed make bash patch gzip bzip2 tar cpio unzip rsync file bc wget
504</p></blockquote>
505
506<p>(It also lists binutils gcc g++ perl python, and for debian it wants
507build-essential. And it wants file to be in /usr/bin because
508<a href=https://git.busybox.net/buildroot/tree/support/dependencies/dependencies.sh?h=2018.02.x#n84>libtool
509breaks otherwise</a>.)</p>
510
511<p>Buildroot does not support a cross toolchain that lives in "/usr/bin"
512with a prefix of "" (if you try, and chop out the test for a blank prefix,
513it dies trying to run "/usr/bin/-gcc"). But you can patch your way to
514making it work if you try.</p>
515
516<hr /><a name=klibc />
517<h2>klibc:</h2>
518
519<p>Long ago some kernel developers came up with a project called
520<a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klibc>klibc</a>.
521After a decade of development it still has no web page or HOWTO,
522and nobody's quite sure if the license is BSD or GPL. It inexplicably
523<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
524replacement.</p>
525
526<p>In addition to a C library even less capable than bionic (obsoleted by
527musl), klibc builds a random assortment of executables to run init scripts
528with. There's no multiplexer command, these are individual executables:</p>
529
530<blockquote><p><b>
531cat chroot cpio dd dmesg false fixdep fstype gunzip gzip halt ipconfig kill
532kinit ln losetup ls minips mkdir mkfifo mknodes
533mksyntax mount mv nfsmount nuke pivot_root poweroff readlink reboot resume
534run-init sh sha1hash sleep sync true umount uname zcat
535</b></p></blockquote>
536
537<p>To get that list, build klibc according to the instructions (I
538<a href=http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#23-01-2013>looked at</a> version
5392.0.2 and did cd klibc-*; ln -s /output/of/kernel/make/headers_install
540linux; make) then <b>echo $(for i in $(find . -type f); do file $i | grep -q
541executable && basename $i; done | grep -v '[.]g$' | sort -u)</b> to find
542executables, then eliminate the *.so files and *.shared duplicates.</p>
543
544<p>Some of those binaries are build-time tools that don't get installed,
545which removes mknodes, mksyntax, sha1hash, and fixdep from the list.
546(And sha1hash is just an unpolished sha1sum anyway.)</p>
547
548<p>The run-init command is more commonly called switch_root, nuke is just
549"rm -rf -- $@", and minips is more commonly called "ps". I'm not doing aliases
550for the oddball names.</p>
551
552<p>Yet more stale forks of dash and gzip sucked in here (see "dubious
553license terms" above), adding nothing to the other projects we've looked at.
554But we still need sh, gunzip, gzip, and zcat to replace this package.</p>
555
556<p>At the time I did the initial analysis toybox already had cat, chroot, dmesg, false,
557kill, ln, losetup, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, readlink, rm, switch_root, sleep, sync,
558true, and uname.</p>
559
560<p>The low hanging fruit is cpio, dd, ps, mv, and pivot_root.</p>
561
562<p>The "kinit" command is another gratuitous rename, it's init running as PID 1.
563The halt, poweroff, and reboot commands work with it.</p>
564
565<p>I've got mount and umount queued up already, fstype and nfsmount go with
566those. (And probably smbmount and p9mount, but this hasn't got one. Those
567are all about querying for login credentials, probably workable into the
568base mount command.)</p>
569
570<p>The ipconfig command here has a built in dhcp client, so it's ifconfig
571and dhcpcd and maybe some other stuff.</p>
572
573<p>The resume command is... weird. It finds a swap partition and reads data
574from it into a /proc file, something the kernel is capable of doing itself.
575(Even though the klibc author
576<a href=http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/klibc/2006-June/001748.html>attempted
577to remove</a> that capability from the kernel, current kernel/power/hibernate.c
578still parses "resume=" on the command line). And yet various distros seem to
579make use of klibc for this.
580Given the history of swsusp/hibernate (and
581<a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/333007>TuxOnIce</a>
582and <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/242107>kexec jump</a>) I've lost track
583of the current state of the art here. Ah, Documentation/power/userland-swsusp.txt
584has the API docs, and <a href=http://suspend.sf.net>here's a better
585tool</a>...</p>
586
587<p>So the list of things actually in klibc are:</p>
588
589<blockquote><b>
590<span id=klibc_cmd>
591cat chroot dmesg false kill ln losetup ls mkdir mkfifo readlink rm switch_root
592sleep sync true uname
593
594cpio dd ps mv pivot_root
595mount nfsmount fstype umount
596sh gunzip gzip zcat
597kinit halt poweroff reboot
598ipconfig
599resume
600</span>
601</b></blockquote>
602
603<hr />
604<a name=glibc />
605<h2>glibc</h2>
606
607<p>Rather a lot of command line utilities come bundled with glibc:</p>
608
609<blockquote><b>
610catchsegv getconf getent iconv iconvconfig ldconfig ldd locale localedef
611mtrace nscd rpcent rpcinfo tzselect zdump zic
612</b></blockquote>
613
614<p>Of those, musl libc only implements ldd.</p>
615
616<p>catchsegv is a rudimentary debugger, probably out of scope for toybox.</p>
617
618<p>iconv has been <a href="#susv4">previously discussed</a>.</p>
619
620<p>iconvconfig is only relevant if iconv is user-configurable; musl uses a
621non-configurable iconv.</p>
622
623<p>getconf is a posix utility which displays several variables from
624unistd.h; it probably belongs in the development toolchain.</p>
625
626<p>getent handles retrieving entries from passwd-style databases
627(in a rather lame way) and is trivially replacable by grep.</p>
628
629<p>locale was discussed under <a href=#susv4>posix</a>.
630localedef compiles locale definitions, which musl currently does not use.</p>
631
632<p>mtrace is a perl script to use the malloc debugging that glibc has built-in;
633this is not relevant for musl, and would necessarily vary with libc. </p>
634
635<p>nscd is a name service caching daemon, which is not yet relevant for musl.
636rpcinfo and rpcent are related to rpc, which musl does not include.</p>
637
638<p>The remaining commands involve glibc's bundled timezone database,
639which seems to be derived from the <a href=http://www.iana.org/time-zones>IANA
640timezone database</a>. Unless we want to maintain our own fork of the
641standards body's database like glibc does, these are of no interest,
642but for completeness:</p>
643
644<p>tzselect outputs a TZ variable correponding to user input.
645The documentation does not indicate how to use it in a script, but it seems
646that Debian may have done so.
647zdump prints current time in each of several timezones, optionally
648outputting a great deal of extra information about each timezone.
649zic converts a description of a timezone to a file in tz format.</p>
650
651<p>None of glibc's bundled commands are currently of interest to toybox.</p>
652
653</b></blockquote>
654
655<hr />
656<a name=sash />
657<h2>Stand-Alone Shell</h2>
658
659<p>Wikipedia has <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-alone_shell>a good
660summary of sash</a>, with links. The original Stand-Alone Shell project reached
661a stopping point, and then <a href=http://www.baiti.net/sash>"sash plus
662patches"</a> extended it a bit further. The result is a megabyte executable
663that provides 40 commands.</p>
664
665<p>Sash is a shell with built-in commands. It doesn't have a multiplexer
666command, meaning "sash ls -l" doesn't work (you have to go "sash -c 'ls -l'").
667</p>
668
669<p>The list of commands can be obtained via building it and doing
670"echo help | ./sash | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/^-//' | xargs echo", which
671gives us:</p>
672
673<blockquote><b>
674alias aliasall ar cd chattr chgrp chmod chown cmp cp chroot dd echo ed exec
675exit file find grep gunzip gzip help kill losetup losetup ln ls lsattr mkdir
676mknod more mount mv pivot_root printenv prompt pwd quit rm rmdir setenv source
677sum sync tar touch umask umount unalias where
678</b></blockquote>
679
680<p>Plus sh because it's a shell. A dozen or so commands can only sanely be
681implemented as shell builtins (alias aliasall cd exec exit prompt quit setenv
682source umask unalias), where is an alias for which, and at triage time toybox
683already has chgrp, chmod, chown, cmp, cp, chroot, echo, help, kill, losetup,
684ln, ls, mkdir, mknod, printenv, pwd, rm, rmdir, sync, and touch.</p>
685
686<p>This leaves:</p>
687
688<blockquote><b>
689<span id=sash_cmd>
690ar chattr dd ed file find grep gunzip gzip lsattr more mount mv pivot_root
691sh sum tar umount
692</span>
693</b></blockquote>
694
695<p>(For once, this project doesn't include a fork of gzip, instead
696it sucks in -lz from the host.)</p>
697
698<hr />
699<a name=sbase />
700<h2>sbase:</h2>
701
702<p>It's <a href=http://git.suckless.org/sbase>on suckless</a> in
703<a href=http://git.suckless.org/ubase>two parts</a>. As of November 2015 it's
704implemented the following (renaming "cron" to "crond" for
705consistency, and yanking "sponge", "mesg", "pagesize", "respawn", and
706"vtallow"):</p>
707
708<blockquote><p>
709<span id=sbase_cmd>
710basename cal cat chgrp chmod chown chroot cksum cmp cols comm cp crond cut date
711dirname du echo env expand expr false find flock fold getconf grep head
712hostname join kill link ln logger logname ls md5sum mkdir mkfifo mktemp mv
713nice nl nohup od paste printenv printf pwd readlink renice rm rmdir sed seq
714setsid sha1sum sha256sum sha512sum sleep sort split strings sync tail
715tar tee test tftp time touch tr true tty uname unexpand uniq unlink uudecode
716uuencode wc which xargs yes
717</span>
718</p></blockquote>
719
720<p>and<p>
721
722<blockquote><p>
723<span id=sbase_cmd>
724chvt clear dd df dmesg eject fallocate free id login mknod mountpoint
725passwd pidof ps stat su truncate unshare uptime watch
726who
727</span>
728</p></blockquote>
729
730<hr />
731<a name=nash />
732<h2>nash:</h2>
733
734<p>Red Hat's nash was part of its "mkinitrd" package, replacement for a shell
735and utilities on the boot floppy back in the 1990's (the same general idea
736as BusyBox, developed independently). Red Hat discontinued nash development
737in 2010, replacing it with dracut (which collects together existing packages,
738including busybox).</p>
739
740<p>I couldn't figure out how to beat source code out of
741<a href=http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/git/mkinitrd>Fedora's current git</a>
742repository. The last release version that used it was Fedora Core 12
743which 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>
744that can be unwound with "rpm2cpio mkinitrd.src.rpm | cpio -i -d -H newc
745--no-absolute-filenames" and in there is a mkinitrd-6.0.93.tar.bz2 which
746has the source.</p>
747
748<p>In addition to being a bit like a command shell, the nash man page lists the
749following commands:</p>
750
751<blockquote><p>
752access echo find losetup mkdevices mkdir mknod mkdmnod mkrootdev mount
753pivot_root readlink raidautorun setquiet showlabels sleep switchroot umount
754</p></blockquote>
755
756<p>Oddly, the only occurrence of the string pivot_root in the nash source code
757is in the man page, the command isn't there. (It seems to have been removed
758when the underscoreless switchroot went in.)</p>
759
760<p>A more complete list seems to be the handlers[] array in nash.c:</p>
761
762<blockquote><p>
763access buildEnv cat cond cp daemonize dm echo exec exit find kernelopt
764loadDrivers loadpolicy mkchardevs mkblktab mkblkdevs mkdir mkdmnod mknod
765mkrootdev mount netname network null plymouth hotplug killplug losetup
766ln ls raidautorun readlink resume resolveDevice rmparts setDeviceEnv
767setquiet setuproot showelfinterp showlabels sleep stabilized status switchroot
768umount waitdev
769</p></blockquote>
770
771<p>This list is nuts: "plymouth" is an alias for "null" which is basically
772"true" (which thie above list doesn't have). Things like buildEnv and
773loadDrivers are bespoke Red Hat behavior that might as well be hardwired in
774to nash's main() without being called.</p>
775
776<p>Instead of eliminating items
777from the list with an explanation for each, I'm just going to cherry pick
778a few: the device mapper (dm, raidautorun) is probably interesting,
779hotplug (may be obsolete due to kernel changes that now load firmware
780directly), and another "resume" ala klibc.</p>
781
782<p>But mostly: I don't care about this one. And neither does Red Hat anymore.</p>
783
784<p>Verdict: ignore</p>
785
786<hr />
787<a name=beastiebox />
788<h2>Beastiebox</h2>
789
790<p>Back in 2008, the BSD guys vented some busybox-envy
791<a href=http://beastiebox.sourceforge.net>on sourceforge</a>. Then stopped.
792Their repository is still in CVS, hasn't been touched in years, it's a giant
793hairball of existing code sucked together. (The web page says the author
794is aware of crunchgen, but decided to do this by hand anyway. This is not
795a collection of new code, it's a katamari of existing code rolled up in a
796ball.)</p>
797
798<p>Combining the set of commands listed on the web page with the set of
799man pages in the source gives us:</P>
800
801<blockquote><p>
802[ cat chmod cp csh date df disklabel dmesg echo ex fdisk fsck fsck_ffs getty
803halt hostname ifconfig init kill less lesskey ln login ls lv mksh more mount
804mount_ffs mv pfctl ping poweroff ps reboot rm route sed sh stty sysctl tar test
805traceroute umount vi wiconfig
806</p></blockquote>
807
808<p>Apparently lv is the missing link between ed and vi, copyright 1982-1997 (do
809not want), ex is another obsolete vi mode, lesskey is "used to
810specify a set of key bindings to be used with less", and csh is a shell they
811sucked in (even though they have mksh?), [ is an alias for test. Several more bsd-isms that don't have Linux
812equivalents (even in the ubuntu "install this package" search) are
813disklabel, fsck_ffs, mount_ffs, and pfctl. And wiconfig is a
814wavelan interface network card driver utility. Subtracting all that and the
815commands toybox already implements at triage time, we get:</p>
816
817<blockquote><p>
818<span id=beastiebox_cmd>
819fdisk fsck getty halt ifconfig init kill less more mount mv ping poweroff
820ps reboot route sed sh stty sysctl tar test traceroute umount vi
821</span>
822</p></blockquote>
823
824<p>Not a hugely interesting list, but eh.</p>
825
826<p>Verdict: ignore</p>
827
828<hr />
829<a name=BsdBox />
830<h2>BsdBox</h2>
831
832<p>Somebody decided to do a <a href=https://wiki.freebsd.org/AdrianChadd/BsdBox>multicall binary for freebsd</a>.</p>
833
834<p>They based it on crunchgen, a tool that glues existing programs together
835into an archive and uses the name to execute the right one. It has no
836simplification or code sharing benefits whatsoever, it's basically an
837archiver that produces executables.</p>
838
839<p>That's about where I stopped reading.</p>
840
841<p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
842
843<hr />
844<a name=slowaris />
845<h2>OpenSolaris Busybox</h2>
846
847<p>Somebody <a href=http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+busybox/>wrote
848a wiki page</a> saying that Busybox for OpenSolaris would be a good idea.</p>
849
850<p>The corresponding "files" tab is an auto-generated stub. The project never
851even got as far as suggesting commands to include before Oracle discontinued
852OpenSolaris.</p>
853
854<p>Verdict: ignore.</p>
855
856<hr />
857<a name=uclinux />
858<h2>uClinux</h2>
859
860<p>Long ago a hardware developer named Jeff Dionne put together a
861nommu Linux distribution, which involved rewriting a lot of command line
862utilities that relied on <a href=http://nommu.org/memory-faq.txt>features
863unavailable on nommu</a> hardware.</p>
864
865<p>In 2003 Jeff moved to Japan and handed
866the project off to people who allowed it to roll to a stop. The website
867turned into a mess of 404 links, the navigation indexes stopped being
868updated over a decade ago, and the project's CVS repository suffered a
869hard drive failure for which there were no backups. The project continued
870to put out "releases" through 2014 (you have to scroll down in the "news"
871section to find them, the "HTTP download" section in the nav bar on the
872left hasn't been updated in over a decade), which were hand-updated tarball
873snapshots mostly consisting of software from the 1990's. For example the
8742014 release still contained ipfwadm, the package which predated ipchains,
875which predated iptables, which is in the process of being replaced by
876nftables.</p>
877
878<p>Nevertheless, people still try to use this because (at least until the
879launch of <a href=http://nommu.org>nommu.org</a>) the project was viewed
880as the place to discuss, develop, and learn about nommu Linux.
881The role of uclinux.org as an educational resource kept people coming
882to it long after it had collapsed as a Linux distro.</p>
883
884<p>Starting around 0.6.0 toybox began to address nommu support with the goal
885of putting uClinux out of its misery.</p>
886
887<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
888subdirectories under "user".</p>
889
890<h3>Taking out the trash</h3>
891
892<p>A bunch of packages (<b>inotify-tools, input-event-demon, ipsec-tools, netifd,
893keepalived, mobile-broadband-provider-info, nuttp, readline, snort,
894snort-barnyard, socat, sqlite, sysklogd, sysstat, tcl, ubus, uci, udev,
895unionfs, uqmi, usb_modeswitch, usbutils, util-linux</b>)
896are hard to evaluate because
897uclinux has directories for them, but their source isn't actually in the
898uclinux tree. In some of these the makefiles download a git repo during
899the build, so I'm assuming you can build the external package if you really
900care. (Even when I know what these packages do, I'm skipping them
901because uclinux doesn't actually contain them, and any given snapshot
902of the build system will bitrot as external web links change over time.)</p>
903
904<p>Other packages are orphaned, meaning they're not mentioned from any Kconfig
905or Makefiles outside of their directory, so uclinux can't actually build
906them: <b>mbus</b> is an orphaned i2c test program expecting to run in some sort
907of hardwired hardware context, <b>mkeccbin</b> is an orphaned "ECC annotated
908binary file" generator (meaning it's half of a flash writer),
909<b>wsc_upnp</b> is a "Ralink WPS" driver (some sort of stale wifi chip)...</p>
910
911<p>The majority of the remaining packages are probably not of interest to
912toybox due to being so obsolete or special purpose they may not actually be
913of interest to anybody anymore. (This list also includes a lot of
914special-purpose network back-end stuff that's hard for anybody but
915datacenter admins to evaluate the current relevance of.)</p>
916
917<blockquote><b><p>
918arj asterisk boottools bpalogin br2684ctl camserv can4linux cgi_generic
919cgihtml clamav clamsmtp conntrack-tools cramfs crypto-tools cxxtest
920ddns3-client de2ts-cal debug demo diald discard dnsmasq dnsmasq2
921ethattach expat-examples ez-ipupdate fakeidentd
922fconfig ferret flatfs flthdr freeradius freeswan frob-led frox fswcert
923game gettyd gnugk haserl horch
924hostap hping httptunnel ifattach ipchains
925ipfwadm ipmasqadm ipportfw ipredir ipset iso_client
926jamvm jffs-tools jpegview jquery-ui kendin-config kismet klaxon kmod
927l2tpd lcd ledcmd ledcon lha lilo lirc lissa load loattach
928lpr lrpstat lrzsz mail mbus mgetty microwin ModemManager msntp musicbox
929nooom null openswan openvpn palmbot pam_* pcmcia-cs playrt plugdaemon pop3proxy
930potrace qspitest quagga radauth
931ramimage readprofile rdate readprofile routed rrdtool rtc-ds1302
932sendip ser sethdlc setmac setserial sgutool sigs siproxd slattach
933smtpclient snmpd net-snmp snortrules speedtouch squashfs scep sslwrap stp
934stunnel tcpblast tcpdump tcpwrappers threaddemos tinylogin tinyproxy
935tpt tripwire unrar unzoo version vpnled w3cam xl2tpd zebra
936</p></b></blockquote>
937
938<p>This stuff is all over the place: arj, lha, rar, and zoo are DOS archivers,
939ethattach describes itself as just "a network tool",
940mail is a textmode smtp mailer literally described as "Some kind of mail
941proggy" in uclinux's kconfig (as opposed to clamsmtp and smtpclient and
942so on), this gettyd isn't a generic version but specifically a
943hardwired ppp dialin utility, mgetty isn't a generic version but is combined
944with "sendfax", hostap is an intersil prism driver, wlan-ng is also an
945intersil prism dirver, null is a program to intentionally dereference a
946null pointer (in case you needed one), iso_client is a
947"Demo Application for the USB Device Driver", kendin-config is
948"for configuring the Micrel Kendin KS8995M over QSPI", speedtouch configures
949a specific brand of asdl modem, portmap is part of Anfs,
950ferret, linux-igd, and miniupnp are all upnp packages,
951lanbypass "can be used to control the LAN
952bypass switches on the Advantech x86 based hardware platforms", lcd is
953"test of lcddma device driver" (an out-of-tree Coldfire driver apparently
954lost to history, the uclinux linux-2.4.x directory has a config symbol for
955it, but nothing in the code actually _uses_ it...), qspitest is another
956coldfire thing, mii-tool-fec is
957"strictly for the FEC Ethernet driver as implemented (and modified) for
958the uCdimm5272", rtc-ds1302 and rtc-m41t11 are usermode drivers for specific
959clock chips, stunnel is basically "openssl s_client -quiet -connect",
960potrace is a bitmap to vector graphic converter, radauth performs command line
961authentication against a radius server,
962clamav, klaxon, ferret, l7-protocols, and nessus are very old network security
963software (it's got a stale snapshot of nmap too), xl2tpd is a PPP over UDP
964tunnel (rfc 2661), zebra is the package quagga replaced,
965lilo is the x86-only bootloader that predated grub (and recently discontinued
966development), lissa is a "framebuffer graphics demo" from
9671998, the squashfs package here is the out of tree patches for 2.4 kernels
968and such before the filesystem was merged upstream (as opposed to the
969squashfs-new package which is a snapshot of the userspace tool from 2011),
970load is basically "dd file /dev/spi", version is basically "cat /proc/version",
971microwin is a port of the WinCE graphics API to Linux, scep is a 2003
972implementation of an IETF draft abandoned in 2010, tpt depends on
973Andrew Morton's 15 year old unmerged "timepegs" kernel patch using the pentium
974cycle counter, vpnled controls a light that reboots systems (what?),
975w3cam is a video4linux 1.0 client (v4l2 showed up during 2.5 and support for
976the old v4l1 was removed in 2.6.38 back in 2011), busybox ate tinylogin
977over a decade ago, lrpstat is a java network monitor
978from 2001, lrzsz is zmodem/ymodem/zmodem, msntp and stp implement rfc2030
979meaning it overflows in 2036 (the package was last updated in 2000), rdate
980is rfc 868 meaning it also overflows in 2036 (which is why ntp was invented
981a few decades back), reiserfsprogs development stopped abruptly after
982Hans Reiser was convicted of murdering his wife Nina (denying it on the
983stand and then leading them to the body as part of his plea bargain during
984sentencing)...
985</p>
986
987<p>Seriously, there's a lot of crap in there. It's hard to analyze most
988of it far enough to prove it _doesn't_ do anything.</p>
989
990<h3>Non-toybox programs</h3>
991
992<p>The following software may actually still do something intelligible
993(although the package versions tend to be years out of date), but
994it's not a direction toybox has chosen to go in.</p>
995
996<p>There are several programming languages (<b>bash, lua, jamvm, tinytcl,
997perl, python</b>) in there. Maybe someone somewhere wants a 2008 release of a
998java virtual machine tested to work on nommu systems (jamvm), but it's out
999of scope for toybox.</p>
1000
1001<p>A bunch of benchmark programs: <b>cpu, dhrystone, mathtest, nbench, netperf,
1002netpipe, and whetstone</b>.</p>
1003
1004<p>A bunch of web servers: <b>appWeb, boa, fnord (via tcpserver), goahead, httpd,
1005mini_httpd, and thttpd</b>.</p>
1006
1007<p>A bunch of shells: <b>msh</b> is a clever (I.E. obfuscated) little shell,
1008<b>nwsh</b> is "new shell" (that's what it called itself in 1999 anyway),
1009<b>sash</b> is another shell with a bunch of builtins (ls, ps, df, cp, date, reboot,
1010and shutdown, this roadmap analyzes it <a href="#sash">elsewhere</a>),
1011<b>sh</b> is a very old minix shell fork, and <b>tcsh</b> is also a shell.</p>
1012
1013<p>Also in this category, we have:</p>
1014
1015<blockquote><b><p>
1016dropbear jffs-tools jpegview kexec-tools bind ctorrent
1017iperf iproute2 ip-sentinel iptables kexec
1018nmap oggplay openssl oprofile p7zip pppd pptp play vplay
1019hdparm mp3play at clock
1020mtd-utils mysql logrotate brcfg bridge-utils flashw
1021ebtables etherwake ethtool expect gdb gdbserver hostapd
1022lm_sensors load netflash netstat-nat
1023radvd recover rootloader resolveip rp-pppoe
1024rsyslog rsyslogd samba smbmount squashfs-new squid ssh strace tip
1025uboot-envtools ulogd usbhubctrl vconfig vixie-cron watchdogd
1026wireless_tools wpa_supplicant
1027</p></b></blockquote>
1028
1029<p>An awful lot of those are borderline: play and vplay are wav file
1030audio players, there's oprofile _and_ readprofile (which just reads kernel
1031profiling data from /proc/profile),
1032radvd is a "routr advertisement daemon" (ipv6 stateless autoconf),
1033ctorrent is a bittorent client,
1034lm_sensors is hardware (heat?) monitoring,
1035resolveip is dig only less so,
1036rp-pppoe is ppp over ethernet,
1037ebtables is an ethernet version of iptables (for bridging),
1038their dropbear is from 2012, and that ssh version is from 2011
1039(which means it's about nine months too _old_ to have the heartbleed bug).
1040There's both ulogd and ulogd2 (no idea why), and pppd is version 2.4 but
1041there's a ppd-2.3 directory also.</p>
1042
1043<p>Lots of flash stuff:
1044flashw is a flash writer, load is an spi flash loader, netflash writes
1045to flash via tftp,
1046recover is also a reflash daemon intended to come up when the system can't boot,
1047rootloader seems to be another reflash daemon but without dhcp.</p>
1048
1049<h3>Already in roadmap</h3>
1050
1051<p>The following packages contain commands already in the toybox roadmap:</p>
1052
1053<blockquote><b><p>
1054agetty cal cksum cron dhcpcd dhcpcd-new dhcpd dhcp-isc dosfstools e2fsprogs
1055elvis-tiny levee fdisk fileutils ftp ftpd grep hd hwclock inetd init ntp
1056iputils login module-init-tools netcat shutils ntpdate lspci ping procps
1057proftpd rsync shadow shutils stty sysutils telnet telnetd tftp tftpd traceroute
1058unzip wget mawk net-tools
1059</p></b></blockquote>
1060
1061<p>There are some duplicates in there, levee is a tiny vi implementation
1062like elvis-tiny, ntp and ntpdate overlap, etc.</p>
1063
1064<p>Verdict: We don't really need to do a whole lot special for nommu
1065systems, just get the existing toybox roadmap working on nommu and
1066we're good. The uClinux project can rest in peace.</p>
1067
1068<hr />
1069<h2>Requests:</h2>
1070
1071<p>The following additional commands have been requested (and often submitted)
1072by various users. I _really_ need to clean up this section.</p>
1073
1074<p>Also:</p>
1075<blockquote><b>
1076<span id=request>
1077dig freeramdisk getty halt hexdump hwclock klogd modprobe ping ping6 pivot_root
1078poweroff readahead rev sfdisk sudo syslogd taskset telnet telnetd tracepath
1079traceroute unzip usleep vconfig zip free login modinfo unshare netcat help w
1080ntpd iwconfig iwlist rdate
1081dos2unix unix2dos catv clear
1082pmap realpath setsid timeout truncate
1083mkswap swapon swapoff
1084count oneit fstype
1085acpi blkid eject pwdx
1086sulogin rfkill bootchartd
1087arp makedevs sysctl killall5 crond crontab deluser last mkpasswd watch
1088blockdev rpm2cpio arping brctl dumpleases fsck
1089tcpsvd tftpd
1090factor fallocate fsfreeze inotifyd lspci nbd-client partprobe strings
1091base64 mix
1092reset hexedit nsenter shred
1093fsync insmod ionice lsmod lsusb rmmod vmstat xxd top iotop
1094lsof ionice compress dhcp dhcpd addgroup delgroup host iconv ip
1095ipcrm ipcs netstat openvt
1096deallocvt iorenice
1097udpsvd adduser
1098microcom tunctl chrt getfattr setfattr
1099kexec
1100ascii crc32 devmem fmt i2cdetect i2cdump i2cget i2cset mcookie prlimit sntp ulimit uuidgen dhcp6 ipaddr iplink iproute iprule iptunnel cd exit toysh bash traceroute6
1101</span>
1102</b></blockquote>
1103
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