BusyBox File System

BusyBox File System

I. Introduction

BusyBox is a standard Linux®A single executable Implementation of the tool. BusyBox contains some simple tools, such as cat and echo, and some larger and more complex tools, for example, grep, find, mount, and telnet (but it has fewer options than the traditional version); some refer to BusyBox as the Swiss army knife in Linux tools.

The birth of BusyBox

BusyBox was originally written by Bruce Perens in 1996 for the Debian GNU/Linux installation disk. The goal is to create a bootable GNU/Linux system on a floppy disk, which can be used as an installation disk and an emergency disk. A floppy disk can save about 1.4-1.7 MB of content, so there is not much space left for the Linux kernel and related user applications.

BusyBox license

BusyBox is issued under the GNU General Public License (GPL) License. This means that if we use BusyBox in a project, we must abide by this license. We can see the license content on the BusyBox Web site (refer to the content in reference to the document section below. The BusyBox team seems to be busy monitoring violations of this License. In fact, they maintain a "Hall of Shame" page to describe the violators.

BusyBox exposes the fact that many standard Linux tools can share many common elements. For example, many file-based tools (such as grep and find) need to search for file code in the directory. When these tools are merged into an executable program, they can share these same elements to produce smaller executable programs. In fact, BusyBox can pack tools of about MB into a size of about KB. This provides more functionality for boot disks and embedded devices using Linux. We can use BusyBox for Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6.

BusyBox: The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux

BusyBox combines tiny versions of specified commonUNIX utilities into a single small executable. it provides replacements formost of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. theutilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNUcousins; however, the options that are supported provide de the expectedfunctionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. busyBoxprovides a fairly complete environment for any small or embedded system.

BusyBox has been written withsize-optimization and limited resources in mind. it is also extremely modularso you can easily include or exclude commands (or features) at compile time. this makes it easy to customize your embedded systems. to create a workingsystem, just add some device nodes in/dev, a few configuration files in/etc, and a Linux kernel.

BusyBoxis maintained by Denys Vlasenko, and licensed under the gnu general publiclicense version 2.

Get BusyBox

Download Source

Download BusyBox versions

Stable version: V1.23.1

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