On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 5:14 PM, David Korn <[email protected]> wrote: > cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: AST busybox ... / was: Re: [ast-developers] Patch for seamless > grep.c integration into libcmd > -------- > >> Erm... busybox is a "monolithic hunk", e.g. one binary which has >> (almost) all comands built-in which are needed to boot and run a >> Unix/Linux machine. The major difference between a AST-based busybox >> and the GPL busybox is that the AST incarnation is _much_ faster >> (because of the ksh93 core and the ability to run builtins in the same >> process... GPL busybox requires to |fork()|/|exec()| for each >> command), has a complete set of features (from the POSIX/SUS >> standards-point of view and multibyte locale support) and doesn't have >> the GPL license (the GPL busybox people are (in-)famous for their GPL >> lawsuites against companies who use it but do not publish their >> modifications... which has given rise to projects who want to develop >> alternatives which are not GPL licensed). >> Current disadvatage of AST busybox is that it is a lot larger from the >> code size point of view (which becomes tricky for embedded devices >> with severe disk space and main memory limitations.. like down to >> 128MB of disk space (for a complete system) and 32MB of main memory >> (AST busybox does not have problems with memory usage... but disk >> space is an issue...)). >> >> ---- >> >> Bye, >> Roland >> > > How much bigger is AST busybox than GPL busybox. > > AST busy box provides its own stdio and malloc(). It should be possible > to removed the ones in libc to reduce space. > > If you don't need the man pages, you could probably save another 250K > or so.
IMO AST busybox should first appear in a form where it can be tested to boot a Linux distribution. Please don't work on size before being feature complete. Lets say, we are interested, but like the busybox from http://www.busybox.net/ there needs to be the option of commercial support. Irek _______________________________________________ ast-developers mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.research.att.com/mailman/listinfo/ast-developers
