Glenn L McGrath | 90d2bff | 2004-05-01 00:49:49 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 1 | Busybox TODO |
| 2 | |
Rob Landley | df4cdaf | 2006-05-19 20:47:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 3 | Stuff that needs to be done. This is organized by who plans to get around to |
| 4 | doing it eventually, but that doesn't mean they "own" the item. If you want to |
| 5 | do one of these bounce an email off the person it's listed under to see if they |
| 6 | have any suggestions how they plan to go about it, and to minimize conflicts |
| 7 | between your work and theirs. But otherwise, all of these are fair game. |
Glenn L McGrath | 90d2bff | 2004-05-01 00:49:49 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 8 | |
Rob Landley | df4cdaf | 2006-05-19 20:47:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 9 | Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>: |
Rob Landley | 4b146e6 | 2006-05-30 18:31:37 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 10 | Add BB_NOMMU to platform.h and migrate __uClinux__ tests to that. |
| 11 | #if defined __UCLIBC__ && !defined __ARCH_USE_MMU__ |
Rob Landley | 0582ee0 | 2006-05-29 05:06:06 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 12 | Add a libbb/platform.c |
| 13 | Implement fdprintf() for platforms that haven't got one. |
| 14 | Implement bb_realpath() that can handle NULL on non-glibc. |
| 15 | Cleanup bb_asprintf() |
| 16 | |
Rob Landley | df4cdaf | 2006-05-19 20:47:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 17 | Migrate calloc() and bb_calloc() occurrences to bb_xzalloc(). |
| 18 | Remove obsolete _() wrapper crud for internationalization we don't do. |
| 19 | Figure out where we need utf8 support, and add it. |
| 20 | |
| 21 | sh |
| 22 | The command shell situation is a big mess. We have three or four different |
| 23 | shells that don't really share any code, and the "standalone shell" doesn't |
| 24 | work all that well (especially not in a chroot environment), due to apps not |
| 25 | being reentrant. I'm writing a new shell (bbsh) to unify the various |
| 26 | shells and configurably add the minimal set of bash features people |
| 27 | actually use. The hardest part is it has to configure down as small as |
| 28 | lash while providing lash's features. The rest is easy in comparison. |
| 29 | bzip2 |
| 30 | Compression-side support. |
| 31 | init |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 0da069d | 2006-05-29 12:54:16 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 32 | General cleanup (should use ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_SYSLOG and ENABLE_FEATURE_INIT_DEBUG). |
Ned Ludd | 5df6d9f | 2006-06-30 21:48:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 33 | depmod |
| 34 | busybox lacks a way to update module deps when running from firmware without the |
| 35 | use of the depmod.pl (perl is to bloated for most embedded setups) and or orig |
Denis Vlasenko | 9213a9e | 2006-09-17 16:28:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 36 | modutils. The orig depmod is rather pointless to have to add to a firmware image |
Ned Ludd | 5df6d9f | 2006-06-30 21:48:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 37 | in when we already have a insmod/rmmod and friends. |
Rob Landley | df4cdaf | 2006-05-19 20:47:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 38 | Unify base64 handling. |
| 39 | There's base64 encoding and decoding going on in: |
| 40 | networking/wget.c:base64enc() |
| 41 | coreutils/uudecode.c:read_base64() |
| 42 | coreutils/uuencode.c:tbl_base64[] |
| 43 | networking/httpd.c:decodeBase64() |
| 44 | And probably elsewhere. That needs to be unified into libbb functions. |
| 45 | Do a SUSv3 audit |
| 46 | Look at the full Single Unix Specification version 3 (available online at |
| 47 | "http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/nfindex.html") and |
| 48 | figure out which of our apps are compliant, and what we're missing that |
| 49 | we might actually care about. |
| 50 | |
| 51 | Even better would be some kind of automated compliance test harness that |
| 52 | exercises each command line option and the various corner cases. |
| 53 | Internationalization |
| 54 | How much internationalization should we do? |
| 55 | |
| 56 | The low hanging fruit is UTF-8 character set support. We should do this. |
| 57 | (Vodz pointed out the shell's cmdedit as needing work here. What else?) |
| 58 | |
| 59 | We also have lots of hardwired english text messages. Consolidating this |
| 60 | into some kind of message table not only makes translation easier, but |
| 61 | also allows us to consolidate redundant (or close) strings. |
| 62 | |
| 63 | We probably don't want to be bloated with locale support. (Not unless we |
| 64 | can cleanly export it from our underlying C library without having to |
| 65 | concern ourselves with it directly. Perhaps a few specific things like a |
| 66 | config option for "date" are low hanging fruit here?) |
| 67 | |
| 68 | What level should things happen at? How much do we care about |
| 69 | internationalizing the text console when X11 and xterms are so much better |
| 70 | at it? (There's some infrastructure here we don't implement: The |
| 71 | "unicode_start" and "unicode_stop" shell scripts need "vt-is-UTF8" and a |
| 72 | --unicode option to loadkeys. That implies a real loadkeys/dumpkeys |
| 73 | implementation to replace loadkmap/dumpkmap. Plus messing with console font |
| 74 | loading. Is it worth it, or do we just say "use X"?) |
| 75 | |
| 76 | Individual compilation of applets. |
| 77 | It would be nice if busybox had the option to compile to individual applets, |
| 78 | for people who want an alternate implementation less bloated than the gnu |
| 79 | utils (or simply with less political baggage), but without it being one big |
| 80 | executable. |
| 81 | |
| 82 | Turning libbb into a real dll is another possibility, especially if libbb |
| 83 | could export some of the other library interfaces we've already more or less |
| 84 | got the code for (like zlib). |
| 85 | buildroot - Make a "dogfood" option |
| 86 | Busybox 1.1 will be capable of replacing most gnu packages for real world |
| 87 | use, such as developing software or in a live CD. It needs wider testing. |
| 88 | |
| 89 | Busybox should now be able to replace bzip2, coreutils, e2fsprogs, file, |
| 90 | findutils, gawk, grep, inetutils, less, modutils, net-tools, patch, procps, |
| 91 | sed, shadow, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, util-linux, and vim. The resulting |
| 92 | system should be self-hosting (I.E. able to rebuild itself from source |
| 93 | code). This means it would need (at least) binutils, gcc, and make, or |
| 94 | equivalents. |
| 95 | |
| 96 | It would be a good "eating our own dogfood" test if buildroot had the option |
| 97 | of using a "make allyesconfig" busybox instead of the all of the above |
| 98 | packages. Anything that's wrong with the resulting system, we can fix. (It |
| 99 | would be nice to be able to upgrade busybox to be able to replace bash and |
| 100 | diffutils as well, but we're not there yet.) |
| 101 | |
| 102 | One example of an existing system that does this already is Firmware Linux: |
| 103 | http://www.landley.net/code/firmware |
| 104 | initramfs |
| 105 | Busybox should have a sample initramfs build script. This depends on |
| 106 | bbsh, mdev, and switch_root. |
Rob Landley | 9c0e4f0 | 2006-06-30 16:38:09 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 107 | mkdep |
| 108 | Write a mkdep that doesn't segfault if there's a directory it doesn't |
| 109 | have permission to read, isn't based on manually editing the output of |
| 110 | lexx and yacc, doesn't make such a mess under include/config, etc. |
| 111 | Group globals into unions of structures. |
| 112 | Go through and turn all the global and static variables into structures, |
| 113 | and have all those structures be in a big union shared between processes, |
| 114 | so busybox uses less bss. (This is a big win on nommu machines.) See |
| 115 | sed.c and mdev.c for examples. |
| 116 | Go through bugs.busybox.net and close out all of that somehow. |
| 117 | This one's open to everybody, but I'll wind up doing it... |
Rob Landley | df4cdaf | 2006-05-19 20:47:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 118 | |
| 119 | |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 05592ac | 2006-09-21 22:58:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 120 | Bernhard Fischer <busybox@busybox.net> suggests to look at these: |
Rob Landley | 0582ee0 | 2006-05-29 05:06:06 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 121 | New debug options: |
| 122 | -Wlarger-than-127 |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 05592ac | 2006-09-21 22:58:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 123 | Cleanup any big users |
| 124 | -Wunused-parameter |
| 125 | Facilitate applet PROTOTYPES to provide means for having applets that |
| 126 | do a) not take any arguments b) need only one of argc or argv c) need |
| 127 | both argc and argv. All of these three options should go for the most |
| 128 | feature complete denominator. |
Rob Landley | 0582ee0 | 2006-05-29 05:06:06 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 129 | Collate BUFSIZ IOBUF_SIZE MY_BUF_SIZE PIPE_PROGRESS_SIZE BUFSIZE PIPESIZE |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 05592ac | 2006-09-21 22:58:38 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 130 | make bb_common_bufsiz1 configurable, size wise. |
| 131 | make pipesize configurable, size wise. |
| 132 | Use bb_common_bufsiz1 throughout applets! |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | be2f9f7 | 2006-11-22 16:48:29 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 133 | Add chrt applet. Please CC Bernhard if you suggest a patch. |
Rob Landley | df4cdaf | 2006-05-19 20:47:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 134 | |
| 135 | As yet unclaimed: |
| 136 | |
Mike Frysinger | b38673f | 2006-02-02 01:41:53 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 137 | ---- |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 138 | find |
Rob Landley | c58fd15 | 2005-10-25 20:22:50 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 139 | doesn't understand (), lots of susv3 stuff. |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 140 | ---- |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 141 | diff |
Rob Landley | df4cdaf | 2006-05-19 20:47:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 142 | Make sure we handle empty files properly: |
Rob Landley | 8bcc6e9 | 2006-01-09 00:54:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 143 | From the patch man page: |
| 144 | |
Mike Frysinger | 0b7dfb5 | 2006-07-27 03:42:30 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 145 | you can remove a file by sending out a context diff that compares |
| 146 | the file to be deleted with an empty file dated the Epoch. The |
| 147 | file will be removed unless patch is conforming to POSIX and the |
| 148 | -E or --remove-empty-files option is not given. |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 149 | --- |
| 150 | patch |
Rob Landley | c9c959c | 2005-10-27 00:57:50 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 151 | Should have simple fuzz factor support to apply patches at an offset which |
Rob Landley | 078bacf | 2005-09-01 03:02:23 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 152 | shouldn't take up too much space. |
Rob Landley | c9c959c | 2005-10-27 00:57:50 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 153 | |
| 154 | And while we're at it, a new patch filename quoting format is apparently |
| 155 | coming soon: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=git&m=112927316408690&w=2 |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 156 | --- |
| 157 | man |
| 158 | It would be nice to have a man command. Not one that handles troff or |
| 159 | anything, just one that can handle preformatted ascii man pages, possibly |
| 160 | compressed. This could probably be a script in the extras directory that |
Rob Landley | c58fd15 | 2005-10-25 20:22:50 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 161 | calls cat/zcat/bzcat | less |
Rob Landley | 8bcc6e9 | 2006-01-09 00:54:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 162 | |
| 163 | (How doclifter might work into this is anybody's guess.) |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 164 | --- |
Rob Landley | 8bcc6e9 | 2006-01-09 00:54:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 165 | ar |
| 166 | Write support? |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | ae114c2 | 2007-01-17 19:51:00 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 167 | ---- |
| 168 | stty / catv |
| 169 | stty's visible() function and catv's guts are identical. Merge them into |
| 170 | an appropriate libbb function. |
| 171 | ---- |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 172 | |
| 173 | Architectural issues: |
| 174 | |
Rob Landley | 7b7c99c | 2005-11-04 20:45:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 175 | bb_close() with fsync() |
| 176 | We should have a bb_close() in place of normal close, with a CONFIG_ option |
| 177 | to not just check the return value of close() for an error, but fsync(). |
| 178 | Close can't reliably report anything useful because if write() accepted the |
Rob Landley | 8bcc6e9 | 2006-01-09 00:54:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 179 | data then it either went out to the network or it's in cache or a pipe |
| 180 | buffer. Either way, there's no guarantee it'll make it to its final |
| 181 | destination before close() gets called, so there's no guarantee that any |
| 182 | error will be reported. |
| 183 | |
Rob Landley | 7b7c99c | 2005-11-04 20:45:54 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 184 | You need to call fsync() if you care about errors that occur after write(), |
| 185 | but that can have a big performance impact. So make it a config option. |
| 186 | --- |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 187 | Unify archivers |
| 188 | Lots of archivers have the same general infrastructure. The directory |
| 189 | traversal code should be factored out, and the guts of each archiver could |
| 190 | be some setup code and a series of callbacks for "add this file", |
| 191 | "add this directory", "add this symlink" and so on. |
| 192 | |
| 193 | This could clean up tar and zip, and make it cheaper to add cpio and ar |
Rob Landley | 8bcc6e9 | 2006-01-09 00:54:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 194 | write support, and possibly even cheaply add things like mkisofs or |
| 195 | mksquashfs someday, if they become relevant. |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 196 | --- |
| 197 | Text buffer support. |
Rob Landley | c58fd15 | 2005-10-25 20:22:50 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 198 | Several existing applets (sort, vi, less...) read |
Rob Landley | f4bb212 | 2005-01-24 06:56:24 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 199 | a whole file into memory and act on it. There might be an opportunity |
| 200 | for shared code in there that could be moved into libbb... |
| 201 | --- |
Rob Landley | 958fa2a | 2005-06-11 22:10:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 202 | Memory Allocation |
| 203 | We have a CONFIG_BUFFER mechanism that lets us select whether to do memory |
| 204 | allocation on the stack or the heap. Unfortunately, we're not using it much. |
| 205 | We need to audit our memory allocations and turn a lot of malloc/free calls |
| 206 | into RESERVE_CONFIG_BUFFER/RELEASE_CONFIG_BUFFER. |
Rob Landley | 1fa4a94 | 2006-06-22 22:05:00 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 207 | For a start, see e.g. make EXTRA_CFLAGS=-Wlarger-than-64 |
Rob Landley | a882126 | 2005-09-16 14:58:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 208 | |
Rob Landley | 958fa2a | 2005-06-11 22:10:42 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 209 | And while we're at it, many of the CONFIG_FEATURE_CLEAN_UP #ifdefs will be |
| 210 | optimized out by the compiler in the stack allocation case (since there's no |
| 211 | free for an alloca()), and this means that various cleanup loops that just |
| 212 | call free might also be optimized out by the compiler if written right, so |
| 213 | we can yank those #ifdefs too, and generally clean up the code. |
Rob Landley | a882126 | 2005-09-16 14:58:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 214 | --- |
| 215 | Switch CONFIG_SYMBOLS to ENABLE_SYMBOLS |
| 216 | |
| 217 | In busybox 1.0 and earlier, configuration was done by CONFIG_SYMBOLS |
| 218 | that were either defined or undefined to indicate whether the symbol was |
| 219 | selected in the .config file. They were used with #ifdefs, ala: |
| 220 | |
| 221 | #ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL |
| 222 | if (other_test) { |
| 223 | do_code(); |
| 224 | } |
| 225 | #endif |
| 226 | |
| 227 | In 1.1, we have new ENABLE_SYMBOLS which are always defined (as 0 or 1), |
| 228 | meaning you can still use them for preprocessor tests by replacing |
| 229 | "#ifdef CONFIG_SYMBOL" with "#if ENABLE_SYMBOL". But more importantly, we |
| 230 | can use them as a true or false test in normal C code: |
| 231 | |
| 232 | if (ENABLE_SYMBOL && other_test) { |
| 233 | do_code(); |
| 234 | } |
| 235 | |
| 236 | (Optimizing away if() statements that resolve to a constant value |
| 237 | is known as "dead code elimination", an optimization so old and simple that |
| 238 | Turbo Pascal for DOS did it twenty years ago. Even modern mini-compilers |
| 239 | like the Tiny C Compiler (tcc) and the Small Device C Compiler (SDCC) |
| 240 | perform dead code elimination.) |
| 241 | |
| 242 | Right now, busybox.h is #including both "config.h" (defining the |
| 243 | CONFIG_SYMBOLS) and "bb_config.h" (defining the ENABLE_SYMBOLS). At some |
| 244 | point in the future, it would be nice to wean ourselves off of the |
| 245 | CONFIG versions. (Among other things, some defective build environments |
| 246 | leak the Linux kernel's CONFIG_SYMBOLS into the system's standard #include |
| 247 | files. We've experienced collisions before.) |
| 248 | --- |
| 249 | FEATURE_CLEAN_UP |
| 250 | This is more an unresolved issue than a to-do item. More thought is needed. |
| 251 | |
| 252 | Normally we rely on exit() to free memory, close files, and unmap segments |
| 253 | for us. This makes most calls to free(), close(), and unmap() optional in |
| 254 | busybox applets that don't intend to run for very long, and optional stuff |
| 255 | can be omitted to save size. |
| 256 | |
| 257 | The idea was raised that we could simulate fork/exit with setjmp/longjmp |
| 258 | for _really_ brainless embedded systems, or speed up the standalone shell |
| 259 | by not forking. Doing so would require a reliable FEATURE_CLEAN_UP. |
| 260 | Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it sounds. |
| 261 | |
| 262 | The problem is, lots of things exit(), sometimes unexpectedly (xmalloc()) |
| 263 | and sometimes reliably (bb_perror_msg_and_die() or show_usage()). This |
| 264 | jumps out of the normal flow control and bypasses any cleanup code we |
| 265 | put at the end of our applets. |
| 266 | |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 8c1eda5 | 2006-08-28 23:39:36 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 267 | It's possible to add hooks to libbb functions like xmalloc() and xopen() |
Rob Landley | a882126 | 2005-09-16 14:58:55 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 268 | to add their entries to a linked list, which could be traversed and |
| 269 | freed/closed automatically. (This would need to be able to free just the |
| 270 | entries after a checkpoint to be usable for a forkless standalone shell. |
| 271 | You don't want to free the shell's own resources.) |
| 272 | |
| 273 | Right now, FEATURE_CLEAN_UP is more or less a debugging aid, to make things |
| 274 | like valgrind happy. It's also documentation of _what_ we're trusting |
| 275 | exit() to clean up for us. But new infrastructure to auto-free stuff would |
| 276 | render the existing FEATURE_CLEAN_UP code redundant. |
| 277 | |
| 278 | For right now, exit() handles it just fine. |
Rob Landley | 8bcc6e9 | 2006-01-09 00:54:46 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 279 | |
| 280 | |
| 281 | |
| 282 | Minor stuff: |
| 283 | watchdog.c could autodetect the timer duration via: |
| 284 | if(!ioctl (fd, WDIOC_GETTIMEOUT, &tmo)) timer_duration = 1 + (tmo / 2); |
| 285 | Unfortunately, that needs linux/watchdog.h and that contains unfiltered |
| 286 | kernel types on some distros, which breaks the build. |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 863073d | 2006-06-04 16:05:02 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 287 | --- |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 395010b | 2006-06-04 15:37:59 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 288 | use bb_error_msg where appropriate: See |
| 289 | egrep "(printf.*\([[:space:]]*(stderr|2)|[^_]write.*\([[:space:]]*(stderr|2))" |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 863073d | 2006-06-04 16:05:02 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 290 | --- |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 395010b | 2006-06-04 15:37:59 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 291 | use bb_perror_msg where appropriate: See |
| 292 | egrep "[^_]perror" |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 863073d | 2006-06-04 16:05:02 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 293 | --- |
| 294 | Remove superfluous fmt occurances: e.g. |
| 295 | fprintf(stderr, "%s: %s not found\n", "unalias", *argptr); |
| 296 | -> fprintf(stderr, "unalias: %s not found\n", *argptr); |
| 297 | --- |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 213cc00 | 2006-06-04 17:58:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 298 | possible code duplication ingroup() and is_a_group_member() |
| 299 | --- |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | e02706f | 2006-07-02 10:33:10 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 300 | Move __get_hz() to a better place and (re)use it in route.c, ash.c, msh.c |
| 301 | --- |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 395010b | 2006-06-04 15:37:59 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 302 | |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 2677cf1 | 2006-01-13 08:46:39 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 303 | |
| 304 | Code cleanup: |
| 305 | |
| 306 | Replace deprecated functions. |
| 307 | |
| 308 | bzero() -> memset() |
| 309 | --- |
| 310 | sigblock(), siggetmask(), sigsetmask(), sigmask() -> sigprocmask et al |
| 311 | --- |
Bernhard Reutner-Fischer | 34fc71f | 2006-04-12 18:50:19 +0000 | [diff] [blame] | 312 | vdprintf() -> similar sized functionality |
| 313 | --- |