Even though it’s Sunday, I’m going back to write about my work on using Busybox as OpenRC shell, and not only.
One of the things we’ve decided for the firmware of the device is to reduce the amount of involved projects as much as possible. The reason falls into the realm of license auditing which is also the reason why I made sure that in Gentoo we now have a split hwids package which is available under a more “easygoing” license. The issue is not as much as not wanting to use GPL’d software, but the issue that the more GPL’d software you have in your firmware, the more you have to be careful to do everything by the letter, as it’s easy to get something wrong even with the best of intents.
Maybe even if I told myself that I disagree with Donnie’s post I’m actually agreeing with my actions.
To be very clear, once the device is available to the customers, we’re going to publish the whole sources of the open-source components, including those that we’re not required to because they are BSD, and even to people who wouldn’t receive the firmware itself, simply because there is no sense in keeping them private. Moreover, there is no change we made that is not trickling upstream already, either in Gentoo or to the original projects, which are mostly Aravis (which Luca is working on) and the Linux kernel (as I had to write some Super I/O drivers, which I intend to improve over the next few months).
Anyway, since we wanted to reduce the amount of projects, no matter what the license, that we depend on, we’ve also decided to replace sysvinit with BusyBox itself. This is not as much of a gain as one would expect, but it’s still significant. The main trick is that you can’t use the default /etc/inittab file Gentoo comes with, but you have to replace it with one compatible with BusyBox’s own init binary.
::sysinit:/sbin/rc sysinit
::wait:/sbin/rc boot
::wait:/sbin/rc
Okay possibly I could have dropped the boot runlevel altogether and just used sysinit and then default, but there is a trick to keep in mind: if you try to mimic the “classic” inittab file, you’ll be using rc default as the last entry: unfortunately if you do it that way, the softlevel= parameter to be passed at the kernel is not going to work at all. I’m not sure why it works on the standard setup, probably due to the implementation of the System V numbered runlevels, but for sure it doesn’t work with BusyBox, as the code in rc.c takes the default as the name of the runlevel to start — not giving a particular runlevel makes it decide which one to start depending on the parameter given, and defaults to, well, default, if none is set explicitly.
Beside this issue, and the small issue with sysctl init script not working correctly with Busybox’s own sysctl command, it seems like, for the very small set of init scripts we’re dealing with, BusyBox is a godsend.
But this is not all, of course! I’m also creating a few init scripts for Busybox applets themselves, for instance I have a bb.acpid script that is used to handle the acpid replacement within BusyBox, and the next up is going to be a (multiplexed) bb.udhcpd script for its own DHCP server. These will soon arrive in a Gentoo near you, and should be very nice if you’re not looking for a full-fledged DHCP server.
The main issues with this, as far as I can tell, is that there is little to no documentation on the format of the configuration file: for what concerns acpid I had to read through the source and guess what it needed, and that’s not so easy to do after a while as you have both common and non-common parser functions… at any rate, you’ll see more documentation about this appear in this blog and (if I can find more time to do this), probably on the Gentoo Wiki, as I think it would be a good idea to document it somewhere — you can make it more likely for me to write more documentation about the stuff I’m not doing for work by sending a thank you or you can otherwise wait for me to have more time.