[Toybox] A thought about toybox and IOT

[Rob Landley]

On 05/07/14 18:06, Tim Bird wrote:
> There were some interesting presentations at the recent ELC about systems
> running with very low memory.  Particularly interesting were the talk about
> micro-Yocto by Tom Zanussi and the talk about Linux on microControllers by
> Vitaly Wool.  Talk slides are online at:
> http://elinux.org/ELC_2014_Presentations

Lemme know when the videos go up.

> One use case that seems to keep coming up, but not mentioned nearly as
> directly as it should be, is single-process systems.  It occurs to me that
> toybox is uniquely positioned to be a great base for single-process proprietary
> systems, because of it's license.

I've generally thought in terms of "bolting it on to u-boot", or a
similar bootloader. Back when I maintained busybox somebody ported it to
newlib+libgloss to run on bare metal, and although I haven't been
working directly towards that use case I've tried not to block it, either.

Part of the reason for the jmp_buf in struct toy_context is to allow
ubiquitous nofork. This is kinda useless on Linux, but mandatory as part
of a bootloader.

But this is all post-1.0 development. The 1.0 taret is musl+android,
which doesn't need this.

> Basically the proprietary piece can be
> statically linked with a few needed toybox tools, into a single binary, with
> the problems that one would encounter with the GPL and busybox.
> This gets you the tools reuse you need, along with static linking, which will
> help with overall system size, as well as allowing for proprietary solutions.

Did I point you at my "rise and fall of copyleft" talk?

https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3

> I'm not saying this should affect development plans for toybox, but it might
> be worth promoting this aspect of toybox, to increase adoption (potentially
> both users and developers).

I'm trying to make a good tool. I'm not trying to tell people what to do
with it.

Right now the focus is development, driven by the needs of the users
we've already got. Once they're happy, I can shake the tree to find more
disgruntled people who need the thing tweaked. :)

>  -- Tim Bird
> Senior Software Engineer, Sony Mobile
> 
> P.S.  Yes - I'm still lurking about. :-)

I'm all for it. Lemme know if you need a thing.

Rob

 1399511112.0