B u s y B o x

The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux

BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in fileutils, shellutils, findutils, textutils, grep, gzip, tar, etc. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or embedded system. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts.

BusyBox has been written with size-optimization and limited resources in mind. It is also extremely modular so you can easily include or exclude commands (or features) at compile time. This makes it easy to customize your embedded systems. To create a working system, just add /dev, a kernel, and a shell. For a really minimal system, you can even use the busybox shell (not Bourne compatible, but very small and quite usable), and the busybox vi editor.

BusyBox is now maintained by Erik Andersen, and its ongoing development is being sponsored by Lineo.

BusyBox is licensed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE

### Screenshot

Because everybody loves screenshots, a screenshot of BusyBox is now available right here

### Mailing List Information

BusyBox now has a mailing list! To subscribe, go and visit this page.

Latest News

- 10 April 2001 - Graph of Busybox Growth
  The illustrious Larry Doolittle has made a PostScript chart of the growth of the Busybox tarball size over time. It is available for downloading / viewing right here.

  (Note that while the number of applets in Busybox has increased, you can still configure Busybox to be as small as you want by selectively turning off whichever applets you don't need.)

- 10 April 2001 -- BusyBox 0.51 released
  BusyBox 0.51 (the "rock-solid release") is now out there. This release adds only 2 new applets: env and vi. The vi applet, contributed by Sterling Huxley, is very functional, and is only 22k. This release fixes 3 critical bugs in the 0.50 release. There were 2 potential segfaults in lash (the busybox shell) in the 0.50 release which are now fixed. Another critical bug in 0.50 which is now fixed: syslogd from 0.50 could potentially deadlock the init process and thereby break your entire system.

  There are a number of improvements in this release as well. For one thing, the wget applet is greatly improved. Dmitry Zakharov added FTP support, and Laurence Anderson make wget fully RFC compliant for HTTP 1.1. The mechanism for including utility functions in previous releases was clumsy and error prone. Now all utility functions are part of a new libbb library, which makes maintaining utility functions much simpler. And BusyBox now compiles on itanium systems (thanks to the Debian itanium porters for letting me use their system!).

  You can read the changelog for complete details. BusyBox 0.51 can be downloaded from ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.

  Have Fun!

- Busybox Boot-Floppy Image

  Because you asked for it, we have made available a Busybox boot floppy image. Here's how you use it:

  1. Download the image
  2. dd it onto a floppy like so: `dd if=busybox.floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 ; sync`
  3. Pop it in a machine and boot up.

  If you want to look at the contents of the initrd image, do this:

      	    mount ./busybox.floppy.img /mnt -o loop -t msdos
      	    cp /mnt/initrd.gz /tmp
      	    umount /mnt
      	    gunzip /tmp/initrd.gz
      	    mount /tmp/initrd /mnt -o loop -t minix

- 15 March 2001 -- BusyBox 0.50 released
  This release adds several new applets including ifconfig, route, pivot_root, stty, and tftp, and also fixes tons of bugs. Tab completion in the shell is now working very well, and the shell's environment variable expansion was fixed. Tons of other things were fixed or made smaller. For a fairly complete overview, see the changelog.

  lash (the busybox shell) is still with us, fixed up a bit so it now behaves itself quite nicely. It really is quite usable as long as you don't expect it to provide Bourne shell grammer. Standard things like pipes, redirects, command line editing, and environment variable expansion work great. But we have found that this shell, while very usable, does not provide an extensible framework for adding in full Bourne shell behavior. So the first order of business as we begin working on the next BusyBox release will be to merge in the new shell currently in progress at Larry Doolittle's website.

- 27 January 2001 -- BusyBox 0.49 released
  Several new applets, lots of bug fixes, cleanups, and many smaller things made nicer. Several cleanups and improvements to the shell. For a list of the most interesting changes you might want to look at the changelog.

  Special thanks go out to Matt Kraai and Larry Doolittle for all their work on this release, and for keeping on top of things while I've been out of town.

  Special Note
  BusyBox 0.49 was supposed to have replaced lash, the BusyBox shell, with a new shell that understands full Bourne shell/Posix shell grammer. Well, that simply didn't happen in time for this release. A new shell that will eventually replace lash is already under construction. This new shell is being developed by Larry Doolittle, and could use all of our help. Please see the work in progress on Larry's website and help out if you can. This shell will be included in the next release of BusyBox.

- 13 December 2000 -- BusyBox 0.48 released
  This release fixes lots and lots of bugs. This has had some very rigorous testing, and looks very, very clean. The usual tar update of course: tar no longer breaks hardlinks, tar -xzf is optionally supported, and the LRP folks will be pleased to know that 'tar -X' and 'tar --exclude' are both now in. Applets are now looked up using a binary search making lash (the busybox shell) much faster. For the new debian-installer (for Debian woody) a .udeb can now be generated.

  The curious can get a list of some of the more interesting changes by reading the changelog.

  Many thanks go out to the many many people that have contributed to this release, especially Matt Kraai, Larry Doolittle, and Kent Robotti.

- Old News
  For the old news, visit the old news page.

Download

- Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from ftp://oss.lineo.com/busybox.
- A new snapshot of the source is made daily and is available as a GNU gzipped tarball right here.
- BusyBox now has its own publically browsable CVS tree, anonymous CVS access, and for those that are actively contributing there is even CVS write access.

Documentation

Current documentation for BusyBox includes:

- BusyBox.html. This is a list of the all the available commands in BusyBox with complete usage information and examples of how to use each app. I have spent a lot of time updating these docs and trying to make them fairly comprehensive. If you find any errors (factual, grammatical, whatever) please let me know.
- README. This is the README file included in the busybox source release.
- BusyBox Bugs. Need to report a bug? Need to check if a bug has been filed?
- If you need more help, the BusyBox mailing list is a good place to start.

Important Links

- Free Software from Bruce Perens
  The original idea for BusyBox, and all versions up to 0.26 were written by Bruce Perens. This is his BusyBox website.

- Freshmeat AppIndex record for BusyBox

- TinyLogin is a nice embedded tool for handling authentication, changing passwords, and similar tasks which nicely complements BusyBox.

- uClibc is a C library for embedded systems. You can actually statically link a "Hello World" application under x86 that only takes 4k (as opposed to 200k under GNU libc). It can do dynamic linking too and works nicely with BusyBox to create very small embedded systems.

- Other cool embedded software.

- opensource.lineo.com.

- Lineo is sponsoring BusyBox development.

Products/Projects Using BusyBox

I know of the following products and/or projects that use BusyBox -- listed in the order I happen to add them to the web page:

- Lineo Embedix Linux
- Debian installer (boot floppies) project
- Linux Router Project
- LEM
- tomsrtbt
- Stormix Installer
- EMAC Linux 2.0 SBC
- Trinux
- ODDAS project
- The Kerbango Internet Radio
- LinuxMagic VPN Firewall
- Build Your Linux Disk
- BasicLinux
- Zdisk
- AdTran - VPN/firewall VPN Linux Distribution
- mkCDrec - make CD-ROM recovery
- Linux on nanoEngine
- Floppyfw
- Midori Linux - Article on Midori Linux on Wired. Quote from Erik at the top of this page

Do you use BusyBox? I'd love to know about it and I'd be happy to link to you.

Mail all comments, insults, suggestions and bribes to Erik Andersen The Busybox logo is copyright 1999,2000,2001, Erik Andersen. |  |  |  |  |