busybox and upx on arm

Tito farmatito at tiscali.it
Sun Jul 19 11:12:37 UTC 2009


On Thursday 09 July 2009 23:21:06 Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> On Tuesday 07 July 2009 21:45, Tito wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I'm experiencing a strange behaviour of busybox.
> > I'm trying to use upx on an android g1 phone.
> > So far I was able to cross-compile a statically linked 
> > and working copy of upx
> > upx compresses the executables on the phone just fine,
> > only busybox seems not to work as expected.
> > upx compresses it but when the compressed
> > busybox is launched it runs the command as
> > expected but never returns to the shell unless it is killed.
> > The only suspect log i can see after killing it is:
> > 
> > <3>[ 3261.966003] init: untracked pid 5064 exited
> > <3>[ 3290.064056] init: untracked pid 5066 exited
> > <3>[ 3339.908325] init: untracked pid 5069 exited
> > 
> > Any hints about what is going wrong here?
> > 
> > BTW: busybox packed with upx on x86 works.
> > 
> > /system/sd # ./upx busybox
> >                        Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
> >                           Copyright (C) 1996 - 2009
> > UPX 3.04        Markus Oberhumer, Laszlo Molnar & John Reiser   Apr 27th 2009
> > 
> >         File size         Ratio      Format      Name
> >    --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
> >     690276 ->    381428   55.26%   linux/armel   busybox
> > 
> > Packed 1 file.
> > /system/sd # ./busybox
> > BusyBox v1.14.2 (2009-07-01 18:27:27 EDT) multi-call binary
> > Copyright (C) 1998-2008 Erik Andersen, Rob Landley, Denys Vlasenko
> > and others. Licensed under GPLv2.
> > See source distribution for full notice.
> > 
> > Usage: busybox [function] [arguments]...
> >    or: function [arguments]...
> > 
> >         BusyBox is a multi-call binary that combines many common Unix
> >         utilities into a single executable.  Most people will create a
> >         link to busybox for each function they wish to use and BusyBox
> >         will act like whatever it was invoked as!
> > 
> > Currently defined functions:
> >         [, [[, arping, ash, awk, basename, bbconfig, bunzip2, bzcat,
> >         bzip2, cat, catv, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chrt, chvt, cksum,
> >         clear, cmp, cp, cpio, crond, crontab, cut, date, dc, dd, deallocvt,
> >         depmod, devmem, df, dhcprelay, diff, dirname, dmesg, dnsd, dos2unix,
> >         du, dumpkmap, dumpleases, echo, egrep, env, ether-wake, expr,
> >         false, fbset, fdisk, fgrep, find, fold, free, freeramdisk, fuser,
> >         getopt, grep, gunzip, gzip, head, hexdump, hostname, hwclock,
> >         ifconfig, ifdown, ifup, insmod, install, ip, ipaddr, iplink,
> >         iproute, iprule, iptunnel, kbd_mode, kill, killall, killall5,
> >         last, length, less, ln, loadfont, loadkmap, losetup, ls, lsmod,
> >         makedevs, md5sum, mdev, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mkswap, mktemp,
> >         modprobe, more, mount, mountpoint, mv, nameif, nc, netstat,
> >         nice, nohup, nslookup, od, openvt, patch, pidof, ping, pipe_progress,
> >         pivot_root, printenv, printf, ps, pwd, rdate, rdev, readlink,
> >         readprofile, realpath, renice, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route,
> >         run-parts, sed, seq, setconsole, setkeycodes, setlogcons, setsid,
> >         sh, sha1sum, showkey, sleep, sort, split, stat, strings, stty,
> >         swapoff, swapon, switch_root, sync, sysctl, tac, tail, tar,
> >         tcpsvd, tee, telnet, telnetd, test, tftp, time, top, touch,
> >         tr, traceroute, true, tty, udhcpd, udpsvd, umount, uname, uniq,
> >         unix2dos, unzip, uptime, usleep, uudecode, uuencode, vconfig,
> >         vi, watch, wc, wget, which, who, whoami, xargs, yes, zcat
> > Killed
> 
> Try in libbb/appletlib.c:
> 
> 
> void FAST_FUNC run_applet_no_and_exit(int applet_no, char **argv)
> {
>         int argc = 1;
> 
>         while (argv[argc])
>                 argc++;
> 
>         /* Reinit some shared global data */
>         xfunc_error_retval = EXIT_FAILURE;
> 
>         applet_name = APPLET_NAME(applet_no);
>         if (argc == 2 && strcmp(argv[1], "--help") == 0) {
>                 /* Special case. POSIX says "test --help"
>                  * should be no different from e.g. "test --foo".  */
> //TODO: just compare applet_no with APPLET_NO_test
>                 if (!ENABLE_TEST || strcmp(applet_name, "test") != 0)
>                         bb_show_usage();
>         }
>         if (ENABLE_FEATURE_SUID)
>                 check_suid(applet_no);
>         exit(applet_main[applet_no](argc, argv));
> }
> 
> Replace
>         exit(applet_main[applet_no](argc, argv));
> with
>         printf("Entering applet_main\n");
>         n = applet_main[applet_no](argc, argv);
>         printf("Exited epplet_main, exiting...\n");
>         exit(n);
> 
> and let me know hat do you see when you run "busybox true".
> --
> vda
> 

Hi,
after doing a little research and asking for advice the author of my phone's ROM
I am now able to reproduce this behaviour consistently.

The busybox binary is built with buildroot-2009.05 (config attached)

The static uclibc binary i obtain is:
debian:~/Desktop/buildroot-2009.05/project_build_arm/uclibc/busybox-1.14.1$ readelf  -h busybox
ELF Header:
  Magic:   7f 45 4c 46 01 01 01 03 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
  Class:                             ELF32
  Data:                              2's complement, little endian
  Version:                           1 (current)
  OS/ABI:                            UNIX - Linux
  ABI Version:                       4
  Type:                              EXEC (Executable file)
  Machine:                           ARM
  Version:                           0x1
  Entry point address:               0x547cc
  Start of program headers:          52 (bytes into file)
  Start of section headers:          0 (bytes into file)
  Flags:                             0x4000002, has entry point, Version4 EABI
  Size of this header:               52 (bytes)
  Size of program headers:           32 (bytes)
  Number of program headers:         2
  Size of section headers:           40 (bytes)
  Number of section headers:         0
  Section header string table index: 0

This can be compressed with the latest upx (needs also libucl):
 hg pull from https://www.pysol.org:4443/hg/upx.hg

debian:~/Desktop/buildroot-2009.05/project_build_arm/uclibc/busybox-1.14.1$ ./upx.out busybox
                       Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
                          Copyright (C) 1996 - 2009
UPX 3.04        Markus Oberhumer, Laszlo Molnar & John Reiser   Apr 27th 2009

        File size         Ratio      Format      Name
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
    588552 ->    315564   53.62%   linux/armel   busybox

Packed 1 file.

After uploading it to the phone the binary shows the exact behaviour as expected:
the requested command is executed but it never returns to the shell.
The output of your debug code is:
/system/sd/bin # ./busybox true

Entering applet_main
Exited applet_main, exiting... (hangs forever)


I've also tested changing exit to _exit

	printf("Entering applet_main\n");
	n = applet_main[applet_no](argc, argv);
	printf("Exited applet_main, exiting...%d\n", n);
	_exit(n);

This seems to fix the bug:

./busybox true
Entering applet_main
Exited applet_main, exiting...0

only if you call ./busybox with no args it hangs, but this is also
fixed by changing:

void FAST_FUNC run_applet_and_exit(const char *name, char **argv)
{
	int applet = find_applet_by_name(name);
	if (applet >= 0)
		run_applet_no_and_exit(applet, argv);
	if (!strncmp(name, "busybox", 7))
-		exit(busybox_main(argv));
+		_exit(busybox_main(argv));
}

Same for when usage is shown.

So it seems that by changing exit with _exit everything works.
Maybe  #define exit _exit ?

Hope this helps you somehow to fix the bug if there is any (maybe it is just a toolchain issue??)

Ciao,
Tito 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: buildroot-config.zip
Type: application/x-zip
Size: 4489 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/attachments/20090719/b0766454/attachment.bin>


More information about the busybox mailing list