Busybox TODO
+Harvest patches from
+http://git.openembedded.org/cgit.cgi/openembedded/tree/recipes/busybox/
+https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/trunk/package/busybox/patches/
+
+
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.
-Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>:
- Add BB_NOMMU to platform.h and migrate __uClinux__ tests to that.
- #if defined __UCLIBC__ && !defined __ARCH_USE_MMU__
- Add a libbb/platform.c
- Implement fdprintf() for platforms that haven't got one.
- Implement bb_realpath() that can handle NULL on non-glibc.
- Cleanup bb_asprintf()
-
- Migrate calloc() and bb_calloc() occurrences to bb_xzalloc().
- Remove obsolete _() wrapper crud for internationalization we don't do.
- Figure out where we need utf8 support, and add it.
+Rob Landley suggested this:
+ Implement bb_realpath() that can handle NULL on non-glibc.
sh
- The command shell situation is a big mess. We have three or four different
+ 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. I'm writing a new shell (bbsh) to unify the various
- shells and configurably add the minimal set of bash features people
- actually use. The hardest part is it has to configure down as small as
- lash while providing lash's features. The rest is easy in comparison.
- bzip2
- Compression-side support.
- init
- General cleanup (should use ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_SYSLOG and ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_DEBUG).
- depmod
- busybox lacks a way to update module deps when running from firmware without the
- use of the depmod.pl (perl is to bloated for most embedded setups) and or orig
- modutils. The orig depmod is rather pointless to have to add to a firmware image
- in when we already have a insmod/rmmod and friends.
- 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.
+ being reentrant.
+
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?)
+ 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
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).
+
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.
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.
+ 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 Fischer <rep.nop@anon.at>:
- Makefile stuff:
- make -j is broken, -j1 is forced atm
+Bernhard Reutner-Fischer <busybox@busybox.net> 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
- Use bb_common_bufsiz1?
+ make bb_common_bufsiz1 configurable, size wise.
+ make pipesize configurable, size wise.
+ Use bb_common_bufsiz1 throughout applets!
As yet unclaimed:
-----
-find
- doesn't understand (), lots of susv3 stuff.
----
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.
+ 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
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/zcat/bzcat | less
-
- (How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.)
----
-ar
- Write support?
----
-crond
- turn FEATURE_DEBUG_OPT into ENABLE_FEATURE_CROND_DEBUG_OPT
Architectural issues:
---
Text buffer support.
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...
+ 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
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
+ 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.
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()
+ 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.
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);
---
use bb_perror_msg where appropriate: See
egrep "[^_]perror"
----
- Remove superfluous fmt occurances: e.g.
- fprintf(stderr, "%s: %s not found\n", "unalias", *argptr);
- -> fprintf(stderr, "unalias: %s not found\n", *argptr);
---
possible code duplication ingroup() and is_a_group_member()
---
- unify itoa: netstat.c, hush.c, lash.c, msh.c
- Put one single, robust version into e.g. safe_strtol.c
+ 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.
---
- Move __get_hz() to a better place and (re)use it in route.c, ash.c, msh.c
+ support start-stop-daemon -d <chdir-path>
---
+(TODO list after discussion 11.05.2009)
-Code cleanup:
+* 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.
-Replace deprecated functions.
+* add tests for some applets
-bzero() -> memset()
----
-sigblock(), siggetmask(), sigsetmask(), sigmask() -> sigprocmask et al
----
-vdprintf() -> similar sized functionality
----
+* 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
projects / oweals / busybox.git / blobdiff