Busybox TODO
-Stuff that needs to be done
+Stuff that needs to be done. All of this is fair game for 1.2.
-tr - missing SuS3 features in busybox 1.0pre10
-
-tr doesnt support [:blank:], [:digit:] or other predefined classes, [=equiv=]
-support is also missing.
+build system
+ make -j is broken, -j1 is forced atm
+ Make sure that the flags get pinned in e.g. Rules.mak so when expanding them
+ later on you get the cached result without the need to re-evaluate them.
----
find
- doesn't understand () or -exec, and these are actually used out in the real
- world. The "make uninstall" of lots of things (including busybox itself)
- breaks because of this, and sometimes even "make install" (like udev).
+ doesn't understand (), lots of susv3 stuff.
----
-comm
- Perl needs "comm" to build. It's small and simple, but we haven't got it.
----
sh
The command shell situation is a big mess. We have three or four different
shells that don't really share any code, and the "standalone shell" doesn't
work all that well (especially not in a chroot environment), due to apps not
being reentrant. Unifying the various shells and figuring out a configurable
way of adding the minimal set of bash features a given script uses is a big
- job, but it be a big improvement.
----
-gzip
- Can't handle compressing multiple files at once. (I don't mean making a
- multiple file archive, I mean compressing more than one file at a time.)
- Some global variables aren't re-initialized between runs.
----
-gunzip
- same problem as gzip. "gunzip one.gz two.gz three.gz" doesn't work for
- two.gz and three.gz due to global variables not getting reset.
+ job, but it would be a big improvement.
+
+ Note: Rob Landley (rob@landley.net) is working on a new unified shell called
+ bbsh, but it's a low priority...
---
diff
- We should have a diff -u command. We have patch, we should have diff
- (we only need to support unified diffs though).
+ Also, make sure we handle empty files properly:
+ From the patch man page:
+
+ you can remove a file by sending out a context diff that compares
+ the file to be deleted with an empty file dated the Epoch. The
+ file will be removed unless patch is conforming to POSIX and the
+ -E or --remove-empty-files option is not given.
---
patch
- should have -i support, and simple fuzz factor support to apply patches
- at an offset shouldn't take up too much space.
+ Should have simple fuzz factor support to apply patches at an offset which
+ shouldn't take up too much space.
+
+ And while we're at it, a new patch filename quoting format is apparently
+ coming soon: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=112927316408690&w=2
---
man
It would be nice to have a man command. Not one that handles troff or
anything, just one that can handle preformatted ascii man pages, possibly
compressed. This could probably be a script in the extras directory that
- calls cat/zcatbzcat | more
----
-less
- More sucks if you're used to less. A tiny less implementation would be
- very nice.
+ calls cat/zcat/bzcat | less
+
+ (How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.)
---
bzip2
Compression-side support.
-
+---
+init
+ General cleanup.
+---
+ar
+ Write support?
+---
+mdev
+ Micro-udev.
+---
+crond
+ turn FEATURE_DEBUG_OPT into ENABLE_FEATURE_CROND_DEBUG_OPT
Architectural issues:
+bb_close() with fsync()
+ We should have a bb_close() in place of normal close, with a CONFIG_ option
+ to not just check the return value of close() for an error, but fsync().
+ Close can't reliably report anything useful because if write() accepted the
+ data then it either went out to the network or it's in cache or a pipe
+ buffer. Either way, there's no guarantee it'll make it to its final
+ destination before close() gets called, so there's no guarantee that any
+ error will be reported.
+
+ You need to call fsync() if you care about errors that occur after write(),
+ but that can have a big performance impact. So make it a config option.
+---
+Unify base64 handling.
+ There's base64 encoding and decoding going on in:
+ networking/wget.c:base64enc()
+ coreutils/uudecode.c:read_base64()
+ coreutils/uuencode.c:tbl_base64[]
+ networking/httpd.c:decodeBase64()
+ And probably elsewhere. That needs to be unified into libbb functions.
+---
Do a SUSv3 audit
Look at the full Single Unix Specification version 3 (available online at
"http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html") and
Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that
exercises each command line option and the various corner cases.
---
+---
+Internationalization
+ How much internationalization should we do?
+
+ The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support. We should do this.
+ (Vodz pointed out the shell's cmdedit as needing work here. What else?)
+
+ We also have lots of hardwired english text messages. Consolidating this
+ into some kind of message table not only makes translation easier, but
+ also allows us to consolidate redundant (or close) strings.
+
+ We probably don't want to be bloated with locale support. (Not unless we can
+ cleanly export it from our underlying C library without having to concern
+ ourselves with it directly. Perhaps a few specific things like a config
+ option for "date" are low hanging fruit here?)
+
+ What level should things happen at? How much do we care about
+ internationalizing the text console when X11 and xterms are so much better
+ at it? (There's some infrastructure here we don't implement: The
+ "unicode_start" and "unicode_stop" shell scripts need "vt-is-UTF8" and a
+ --unicode option to loadkeys. That implies a real loadkeys/dumpkeys
+ implementation to replace loadkmap/dumpkmap. Plus messing with console font
+ loading. Is it worth it, or do we just say "use X"?)
+---
Unify archivers
Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory
traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could
"add this directory", "add this symlink" and so on.
This could clean up tar and zip, and make it cheaper to add cpio and ar
- write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs someday,
- if it becomes relevant.
+ write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs or
+ mksquashfs someday, if they become relevant.
---
Text buffer support.
- Several existing applets and potential additions (sort, vi, less...) read
+ Several existing applets (sort, vi, less...) read
a whole file into memory and act on it. There might be an opportunity
for shared code in there that could be moved into libbb...
---
got the code for (like zlib).
---
buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option
- Busybox is now capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world use,
- such as developing software or in a live CD. A system built from busybox
- (1.00 with updated sort.c), uclibc 0.9.27, gcc, binutils, make, and a few
- other development tools (http://www.landley.net/code/firmware has an example
- system using autoconf, automake, bison, flex, libtools, m4, zlib,
- and groff: dunno what subset of that is actually necessary) is capable of
- rebuilding itself, from scratch, under itself.
+ Busybox 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world use,
+ such as developing software or in a live CD. It needs wider testing.
+
+ Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file,
+ findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps,
+ sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim. The resulting
+ system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source code).
+ This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or equivalents.
It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option
- of using busybox instead of bzip2, coreutils, file, findutils, gawk, grep,
- inetutils, modutils, net-tools, procps, sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar,
- util-linux, and vim. Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we
- can fix. (It would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to
- replace bash, diffutils, gzip, less, and patch as well.)
+ of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above
+ packages. Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we can fix. (It
+ would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to replace bash and
+ diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.)
+
+ One example of an existing system that does this already is Firmware Linux:
+ http://www.landley.net/code/firmware
+---
+initramfs
+ Busybox should have a sample initramfs build script. This depends on
+ bbsh, mdev, and switch_root.
+---
+Memory Allocation
+ We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory
+ allocation on the stack or the heap. Unfortunately, we're not using it much.
+ We need to audit our memory allocations and turn a lot of malloc/free calls
+ into RESERVE_CONFIG_BUFFER/RELEASE_CONFIG_BUFFER.
+ For a start, see e.g. make CFLAGS_EXTRA=-Wlarger-than-64
+
+ And while we're at it, many of the CONFIG_FEATURE_CLEAN_UP #ifdefs will be
+ optimized out by the compiler in the stack allocation case (since there's no
+ free for an alloca()), and this means that various cleanup loops that just
+ call free might also be optimized out by the compiler if written right, so
+ we can yank those #ifdefs too, and generally clean up the code.
+---
+Switch CONFIG_SYMBOLS to ENABLE_SYMBOLS
+
+ In busybox 1.0 and earlier, configuration was done by CONFIG_SYMBOLS
+ that were either defined or undefined to indicate whether the symbol was
+ selected in the .config file. They were used with #ifdefs, ala:
+
+ #ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL
+ if (other_test) {
+ do_code();
+ }
+ #endif
+
+ In 1.1, we have new ENABLE_SYMBOLS which are always defined (as 0 or 1),
+ meaning you can still use them for preprocessor tests by replacing
+ "#ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL" with "#if ENABLE_SYMBOL". But more importantly, we
+ can use them as a true or false test in normal C code:
+
+ if (ENABLE_SYMBOL && other_test) {
+ do_code();
+ }
+
+ (Optimizing away if() statements that resolve to a constant value
+ is known as "dead code elimination", an optimization so old and simple that
+ Turbo Pascal for DOS did it twenty years ago. Even modern mini-compilers
+ like the Tiny C Compiler (tcc) and the Small Device C Compiler (SDCC)
+ perform dead code elimination.)
+
+ Right now, busybox.h is #including both "config.h" (defining the
+ CONFIG_SYMBOLS) and "bb_config.h" (defining the ENABLE_SYMBOLS). At some
+ point in the future, it would be nice to wean ourselves off of the
+ CONFIG versions. (Among other things, some defective build environments
+ leak the Linux kernel's CONFIG_SYMBOLS into the system's standard #include
+ files. We've experienced collisions before.)
+---
+FEATURE_CLEAN_UP
+ This is more an unresolved issue than a to-do item. More thought is needed.
+
+ Normally we rely on exit() to free memory, close files, and unmap segments
+ for us. This makes most calls to free(), close(), and unmap() optional in
+ busybox applets that don't intend to run for very long, and optional stuff
+ can be omitted to save size.
+
+ The idea was raised that we could simulate fork/exit with setjmp/longjmp
+ for _really_ brainless embedded systems, or speed up the standalone shell
+ by not forking. Doing so would require a reliable FEATURE_CLEAN_UP.
+ Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it sounds.
+
+ The problem is, lots of things exit(), sometimes unexpectedly (xmalloc())
+ and sometimes reliably (bb_perror_msg_and_die() or show_usage()). This
+ jumps out of the normal flow control and bypasses any cleanup code we
+ put at the end of our applets.
+
+ It's possible to add hooks to libbb functions like xmalloc() and bb_xopen()
+ to add their entries to a linked list, which could be traversed and
+ freed/closed automatically. (This would need to be able to free just the
+ entries after a checkpoint to be usable for a forkless standalone shell.
+ You don't want to free the shell's own resources.)
+
+ Right now, FEATURE_CLEAN_UP is more or less a debugging aid, to make things
+ like valgrind happy. It's also documentation of _what_ we're trusting
+ exit() to clean up for us. But new infrastructure to auto-free stuff would
+ render the existing FEATURE_CLEAN_UP code redundant.
+
+ For right now, exit() handles it just fine.
+
+
+
+Minor stuff:
+ watchdog.c could autodetect the timer duration via:
+ if(!ioctl (fd, WDIOC_GETTIMEOUT, &tmo)) timer_duration = 1 + (tmo / 2);
+ Unfortunately, that needs linux/watchdog.h and that contains unfiltered
+ kernel types on some distros, which breaks the build.
+
+
+Code cleanup:
+
+Replace deprecated functions.
+
+bzero() -> memset()
+---
+sigblock(), siggetmask(), sigsetmask(), sigmask() -> sigprocmask et al
+---
+vdprintf() -> similar sized functionality
+---
+
projects / oweals / busybox.git / blobdiff