Chapter 11. BusyBox

In this chapter

• Introduction to BusyBox page 274

• BusyBox Configuration page 275

• BusyBox Operation page 278

• Chapter Summary page 288

The man page for BusyBox declares that BusyBox is "The Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux." This is a fitting description, for BusyBox is a small and efficient replacement for a large collection of standard Linux command line utilities. It often serves as the foundation for a resource-limited embedded platform. This chapter introduces BusyBox and provides a good starting point for customizing your own BusyBox installation.

We previously alluded to BusyBox in multiple locations. In this chapter, we present the details of this useful package. After a brief introduction to BusyBox, we explore the BusyBox configuration utility. This is used to tailor BusyBox to your particular requirements. We then discuss the requirements for cross-compiling the BusyBox package.

BusyBox operational issues are considered, including how it is used in an embedded system. We examine the BusyBox initialization sequence and explain how this departs from the standard System V initialization. In this section, we also present an example initialization script. After seeing the steps for installing BusyBox on a target system, you will learn about some of the BusyBox commands and their limitations.