busybox 1.1.3 - fork on nommu

[Stuart Hughes]

On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 22:25 -0500, Rick Garcia wrote:
> Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> > On Thursday 26 October 2006 01:35, Rick Garcia wrote:

> 
> 	I think it's doable.  I noticed that the older versions of busybox 
> (1.1.2 and below) used vfork in that situation.
> 
> 	As a larger issue tho... this seems like a pretty big problem for a 
> package intended for use on embedded systems, which are the ones that 
> might not have mmu's.  Aside from just not using fork, is there any 
> "standard"(and I use the word in the loosest possible sense) way of 
> handling this?  Using either uClibc or the kernel to redirect is one 
> option that occurs to me... but I shudder at the thought of how many 
> apps that would break.
> 
> 	Right now, it's probably best for nommu systems to return an error if 
> an app tries to fork; seeing as how busybox is primarily for use on 
> minimal (read embedded) systems, shouldn't we be avoiding use of 
> functions like fork, which rely heavily on an mmu?
> 

busybox is used extensively on noMMU platforms see
http://www.uclinux.org the distro for this is uClinux-dist. 

For this to work, busybox needs to be patched to take care of the
fork/vfork issue.  FWIW I have pulled out the changes for busybox-nommu
from uClinux-dist into a separate patch that you can find here:
http://www.bitshrine.org/autodocs/bsp_ext_ava_m520xevb.html (see
busybox-1.00-mmuless.patch)

Unfortunately this is the latest version I have at the moment.

Regards, Stuart