BUSYBOX
BusyBox

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 GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. 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 provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or embedded system.

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, /etc, and a kernel.

BusyBox is maintained by Erik Andersen, and 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 has a mailing list.
To subscribe, go and visit this page.
Before asking questions on the mailing list you should probably first search the mailing list archives...
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Latest News

  • 30 July 2003 -- BusyBox 1.0.0-pre2 released

    Here goes another pre release for the new BusyBox stable series. The last prerelease (pre1) was given quite a lot of testing (thanks everyone!) which has helped turn up a number of bugs, and these problems have now been fixed.

    Highlights of -pre2 include updating the 'ash' shell to sync up with the Debian 'dash' shell, a new 'hdparm' applet was added, init again supports pivot_root, The 'reboot' 'halt' and 'poweroff' applets can now be used without using busybox init. an ifconfig buffer overflow was fixed, losetup now allows read-write loop devices, uClinux daemon support was added, the 'watchdog', 'fdisk', and 'kill' applets were rewritten, there were tons of doc updates, and there were many other bugs fixed.

    If you have submitted a patch and it is not included in this release and Erik has not emailed you explaining why your patch was rejected, it is safe to say that he has lost your patch. That happens sometimes. Please re-submit your patch to the BusyBox mailing list.

    The point of the "-preX" versions is to get a larger group of people and vendors testing, so any problems that turn up can be fixed prior to the final 1.0.0 release. The main feature that is still still on the TODO list before the final BusyBox 1.0.0 release is adding module support for the new 2.6.x kernels. If necessary, a -pre3 BusyBox release will happen on August 6th. Hopefully (i.e. unless some horrible catastrophic problem turns up) the final BusyBox 1.0.0 release will be ready by then...

    The changelog has all the details. As usual you can download busybox here.

    Have Fun!

  • Old News
    For the old news, visit the old news page.
Sponsors
Please visit our sponsors and thank them for their support! They have provided money for equipment and bandwidth. Next time you need help with a project, consider these fine companies! Several individuals have also contributed. If you have already contributed and would like your name added here, just let me know. If you would like to be a BusyBox sponsor, email Erik.
Download
Source for the latest release can always be downloaded from http://www.busybox.net/downloads.

BusyBox now has two CVS trees. The "busybox-stable" tree contains the older 0.60.x stable series. The "busybox" tree contains the latest 1.0.0-preX development version of busybox.
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.
  • 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.
  • udhcp is a tiny dhcp client and/or server which is ideal for embedded systems.
  • 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 Linux systems.
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:

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
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