BusyBox is a multicall (more later on what this means) binary that provides many of the programs normally found on a Linux host. The implementations of the programs are designed so that they’re small both in size but also with respect to how much memory they consume while running. In order to be as small as possible, the programs supply a subset of the functionality offered by the programs running on desktop system. BusyBox is highly configurable, with lots of knobs to turn to reduce the amount of space it requires; for example, you can leave out all the command-line help to reduce the size of the program.
As for the multicall binary concept, BusyBox is compiled as a single program. The root file system is populated with symlinks to the BusyBox executable; the name of the symlink controls what bit of functionality BusyBox runs. For example, you can do the following on an embedded system:
$ls -l /bin/ls
/bin/ls -> /bin/busybox
When you executes /bin/ls, the value of argv[0] is "/bin/ls". BusyBox runs this argument through a switch statement, which then calls the function ls_main(), passing in all the parameters on the command line. BusyBox calls the programs it provides applets.
BusyBox is a key component of most embedded systems. It’s frequently used in conjunction with the uClibc project to create very small systems. I dedicate a chapter to the nuances of BusyBox and uClibc so you can understand when and how to take advantage of these great projects.
Source of Information : Pro Linux Embedded Systems (December 2009)
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