Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

sunburnt · Joined: 08 Jun 2005 Posts: 4001 Location: Arizona, U.S.A.

Yes, I realize BusyBox isn`t for the purpose of reduced size.
I just question it`s seeming general usefulness, and it`s value in Squash based systems.
I have no doubt that there`s a lot more going on with it.

If it`s truly an enhancement then perhaps it should be expanded?
Add in sed, grep, cut, paste, comm, awk, and perhaps even more...
This would "containerize" most of the loose Linux utility files.

Ibidem · Joined: 25 May 2010 Posts: 243

Busybox has sed, awk, lpd, vi, fdisk, mkfs, fsck, and so on--it's enough to build the kernel, combined with binutils, gcc, and make. You probably want CONFIG_DESKTOP, though.
I've actually usedit as a full standalone OS.

IIRC, UPX hurts because it ends up killing the self-exec trick or something similar--could be wrong; I remember they mentioned it was NOT good for anything which has multiple instances.
I'd expect Busybox to be an improvement on compressed filesystems due to reduced filesystem io-it self-executes from RAM that is required just to run it, so you don't have it eating up cycles on decompression or cached in ram.
The big space savings (IIRC) was actually in just having one ELF header.
A shared, split Busybox with libbusybox.so was ~6-7 MB in the 1.18 timeline (an interesting config option that is well hidden: enable PIC, then edit .config and uncomment it; I forget the name of the option...)

technosaurus · Joined: 18 May 2008 Posts: 3843

The problem with libbusybox.so is that it only exports the <applet>_main functions, not the other functions that could be useful for linking against for creating other apps (I believe this was brought up on the mailing list at some point) ... things like the zlib/bz2/xz, md5/sha1 and other numerous helper functions, but this is likely due to license choice being gpl vs. lgpl - industry isn't usually interested in gpl-ing a major work, but now there is toybox.