[Toybox] Toybox / mkroot init

[Roberto A. Foglietta]

On Tue, 17 Feb 2026 at 12:21, Roberto A. Foglietta
<roberto.foglietta at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > Finally, one more question because I saw musl in a toybox:
> > >
> > > - What's about https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan ?
> >
> > Are you trolling, or are you serious?
>
> I am serious, I did not have the time yet to investigate it. My fault
> for having not done my homework before asking and just hoping for a
> brief answer by a supposedly well-known human instead of querying an
> AI chatbot. Sorry, for asking OT.

Both UPX and APE are powerful but troublesome, in some cases overcomplicated.

> By the way, I have cited busybox because I wish to have a toybox or a
> busybox (the advantage of ash, from my PoV but ash can be provided as
> its own alone) as self-contained executable which is something above
> in terms of abstraction than a static binary, it is an executable
> initramfs before even the concept of file system enters in the scene
> (and thus cannot be accessible by userland in any manner by direct
> interaction). I agree that a not detailed idea is a confused idea, but
> intuitions are useful and once the intuition gets detailed in depth,
> usually it is a code or a PoV (like uchaos, for example).
>

Something like this

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robang74/bare-minimal-linux-system/refs/heads/main/gzcmd.sh

but under steroids like

toybox zelf [-c for creation otherwise interpreter]

that unzip and run gzip elf files if they have execution bit enabled
or appropriate (changed) magic number to avoid confusion between
regular .gz imported by VFAT thus with x-bits from zELF binaries.

Suggestions about race conditions and corner cases or security
breaches that might happen by using gzcmd.sh are welcome, as well as
porting in toysh. Adopted the MIT license.

Cheers, R-