X-Git-Url: https://git.librecmc.org/?a=blobdiff_plain;f=TODO;h=dcf48c2c2cb2cb793f41cf2cd5817299c0ba1dfd;hb=31d6734457b9cafeeaa862750c2afa80aa67816c;hp=3d9af20a78f75a40640a962538f34d92beab71dc;hpb=b7e6f13b3c264f6d689f0eefc61d4718c3043062;p=oweals%2Fbusybox.git diff --git a/TODO b/TODO index 3d9af20a7..dcf48c2c2 100644 --- a/TODO +++ b/TODO @@ -1,57 +1,262 @@ -TODO list for busybox in no particular order. Just because something -is listed here doesn't mean that it is going to be added to busybox, -or that doing so is even a good idea. It just means that I _might_ get -around to it some time. If you have any good ideas, please let me know. +Busybox TODO -* login/sulogin/passwd/getty/etc are part of tinylogin, and so are not - needed or wanted in busybox (or else I'd have to link to libcrypt). +Harvest patches from +http://git.openembedded.org/cgit.cgi/openembedded/tree/recipes/busybox/ +https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/busybox/patches/ -* We _were_ going to split networking apps into a new package called - netkit-tiny. Per discussions on the mailing list, this isn't going - to happen. False alarm. Sorry about the confusion. +Stuff that needs to be done. This is organized by who plans to get around to +doing it eventually, but that doesn't mean they "own" the item. If you want to +do one of these bounce an email off the person it's listed under to see if they +have any suggestions how they plan to go about it, and to minimize conflicts +between your work and theirs. But otherwise, all of these are fair game. - -Erik +Rob Landley suggested this: + Implement bb_realpath() that can handle NULL on non-glibc. ------------ + sh + The command shell situation is a mess. We have two 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. -Possible apps to include some time: + 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 + figure out which of our apps are compliant, and what we're missing that + we might actually care about. -* hwclock -* start-stop-daemon -* group/commonize strings, remove dups (for i18n, l10n) + 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? -With sysvinit, reboot, poweroff and halt all used a named pipe, -/dev/initctl, to communicate with the init process. Busybox -currently uses signals to communicate with init. This makes -busybox incompatible with sysvinit. We should probably use -a named pipe as well so we can be compatible. + The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support. We should do this. + See TODO_unicode file. ------------------------ + 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. -Run the following: + 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?) - rm -f busybox && make LDFLAGS+=-nostdlib 2>&1 | \ - sed -ne 's/.*undefined reference to `\(.*\)..*/\1/gp' | sort | uniq + 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"?) -reveals the list of all external (i.e., libc) things that BusyBox depends on. -It would be a very nice thing to reduce this list to an absolute minimum, to -reduce the footprint of busybox, especially when staticly linking with -libraries such as uClibc. + Individual compilation of applets. + It would be nice if busybox had the option to compile to individual applets, + for people who want an alternate implementation less bloated than the gnu + utils (or simply with less political baggage), but without it being one big + executable. ------------------------ + Turning libbb into a real dll is another possibility, especially if libbb + could export some of the other library interfaces we've already more or less + got the code for (like zlib). -Compile with debugging on, run 'nm --size-sort ./busybox' -and then start with the biggest things and make them smaller... + buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option + 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. - du.c probably ought to have an -x switch like GNU du does... + It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option + 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 -xargs could use a -l option + initramfs + Busybox should have a sample initramfs build script. This depends on + shell, mdev, and switch_root. ------------------------------------------------------------------- + mkdep + Write a mkdep that doesn't segfault if there's a directory it doesn't + have permission to read, isn't based on manually editing the output of + lexx and yacc, doesn't make such a mess under include/config, etc. + + Group globals into unions of structures. + Go through and turn all the global and static variables into structures, + and have all those structures be in a big union shared between processes, + so busybox uses less bss. (This is a big win on nommu machines.) See + sed.c and mdev.c for examples. + + Go through bugs.busybox.net and close out all of that somehow. + This one's open to everybody, but I'll wind up doing it... + +Bernhard Reutner-Fischer suggests to look at these: + New debug options: + -Wlarger-than-127 + Cleanup any big users + Collate BUFSIZ IOBUF_SIZE MY_BUF_SIZE PIPE_PROGRESS_SIZE BUFSIZE PIPESIZE + make bb_common_bufsiz1 configurable, size wise. + make pipesize configurable, size wise. + Use bb_common_bufsiz1 throughout applets! + +As yet unclaimed: + +---- +diff + 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 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 + +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 archivers + Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory + traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could + be some setup code and a series of callbacks for "add this file", + "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 or + mksquashfs someday, if they become relevant. +--- +Text buffer support. + Several existing applets (sort, vi, less...) read + a whole file into memory and act on it. Use open_read_close(). +--- +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 EXTRA_CFLAGS=-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. +--- +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 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. +--- + use bb_error_msg where appropriate: See + egrep "(printf.*\([[:space:]]*(stderr|2)|[^_]write.*\([[:space:]]*(stderr|2))" +--- + use bb_perror_msg where appropriate: See + egrep "[^_]perror" +--- + possible code duplication ingroup() and is_a_group_member() +--- + Move __get_hz() to a better place and (re)use it in route.c, ash.c +--- + See grep -r strtod + Alot of duplication that wants cleanup. +--- + unify progress_meter. wget, flash_eraseall, pipe_progress, fbsplash, setfiles. +--- + support start-stop-daemon -d +--- +vdprintf() -> similar sized functionality +--- + +(TODO list after discussion 11.05.2009) + +* shrink tc/brctl/ip + tc/brctl seem like fairly large things to try and tackle in your timeframe, + and i think people have posted attempts in the past. Adding additional + options to ip though seems reasonable. + +* add tests for some applets + +* implement POSIX utilities and audit them for POSIX conformance. then + audit them for GNU conformance. then document all your findings in a new + doc/conformance.txt file while perhaps implementing some of the missing + features. + you can find the latest POSIX documentation (1003.1-2008) here: + http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ + and the complete list of all utilities that POSIX covers: + http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html + The first step would to generate a file/matrix what is already archived + (also IPV6) + +* implement 'at' + +* rpcbind (former portmap) or equivalent + so that we don't have to use -o nolock on nfs mounts + +* check IPV6 compliance + +* generate a mini example using kernel+busybox only (+libc) for example + +* more support for advanced linux 2.6.x features, see: iotop + most likely there is more + +* even more support for statistics: mpstat, iostat, powertop....