[Question] Questions about the BusyBox specification.

Rich Felker dalias at libc.org
Fri Jun 27 13:26:27 UTC 2014


On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 10:06:07AM +0200, Frank Ihle wrote:
>  >> (6) Is there a (stateless/statefull) firewall for BusyBox ?
>  > think this is not related to busybox. Use iptables?

The lack of an iptables command in Busybox is something that would be
nice to fix, especially since the official iptables is bloated and
(last I checked) requires dynamic linking. But this would still not be
"a firewall for Busybox" (because Busybox is NOT AN OS), just an
alternate implementation of the low-level firewall configuration tool.

>  >> (7.1) Does BusyBox provide a Network stack ?
>  >Run: make menuconfig
>  >and look under Networking utilities
> 
> Alright, according to my question, is the answer in this Thread
> (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19349923/tcp-ip-stack-in-busybox)
> then wrong? There they say there is no TCP/IP stack in BusyBox.

There's not, because Busybox is not an OS/kernel. Busybox is simply an
alternate implementation of some of the "essential" userspace
utilities for providing things like standard POSIX commands, network
configuration, filesystem creation and repair, (de)compression and
archive utilities, etc.

The "TCP/IP stack" (a somewhat dated term, BTW) is in the kernel.

>  >> (10) What is the long-term availability of BusyBox? Can it be
>  >> expected to be available for at least 10 years ?
>  >You download the source, you will have it forever.
> 
> Maybe I should have asked differently: will BusyBox be developped
> and supported in future or e.g.: will there be a successor program
> and therefore BusyBox would be left on a final state ?

There's little guarantee of anything like this, but considering how
widely Busybox is used, I would be really surprised if somebody else
didn't pick up development if the current maintainers got tired of it.
Of course there's no guarantee that someone who did so would continue
to develop in a direction that's appealing to your needs, but since
it's free software, you're always free to do your own fork or hire
someone to do it.

There's also Toybox, which I suspect Rob would call a "successor" to
Busybox.. ;-)

Rich


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