Chapter 14. BusyBox

BusyBox is an open source project that is a key part of many embedded systems. It supplies limited-functionality implementations of most of the command-line executables found on a desktop Linux system; BusyBox calls these applets. What the applets lack in functionality is more than compensated for in their size: a complete, full-featured BusyBox system weighs in at 1.5MB and can be much smaller when unused applets are dropped. In addition to being small, BusyBox is also clever about how it's deployed on an embedded target: it's just one file. Symbolic links named after the applications they replace point to the BusyBox executable. This makes BusyBox easy to deploy and manage.

The infrastructure for creating applets is very organized. ...

Get Pro Linux Embedded Systems now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.