Original author(s) | Robert Landley |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Robert Landley and others |
Initial release | 2006 |
Stable release | 0.8.10 / July 30, 2023 |
Repository | |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Unix-like |
Size | 3.30 MB (archived) |
Type | Independent SUS XCU implementation |
License | 0BSD [1] [2] |
Website | www |
Toybox is a free and open-source software implementation of over 200 Unix command line utilities such as ls , cp , and mv . The Toybox project was started in 2006, [3] and became a 0BSD licensed BusyBox alternative. [4] [5] Toybox is used for most of Android's command-line tools in all currently supported Android versions, and is also used to build Android on Linux and macOS. All of the tools are tested on Linux, and many of them also work on BSD and macOS.
Toybox aims to provide a BSD licensed replacement for the GPL licensed BusyBox. [6] Toybox's major technical design goals are simplicity, smallness, speed and standard compliance. [7] Toybox aims to be mostly POSIX-2008 and LSB 4.1 compatible, and doesn't focus on having every option found in GNU counterparts. [3]
Toybox is licensed using the permissive 0BSD license, where BusyBox uses the copyleft GNU General Public License, which led to different usage domains. BusyBox is mostly used in the copyleft FOSS domain, while Toybox is used mostly with permissive licensed projects and by commercial companies, e.g. Google's Android, [8] which is an explicit target of Toybox. [9] Feature-wise, Toybox has not reached parity with BusyBox.
Toybox was started in early 2006 by Rob Landley [3] [5] after he ended his BusyBox maintainership due to a dispute with Bruce Perens, the original creator of BusyBox. [10]
In 2008, the project went dormant [4] until the end of 2011. Rob Landley resumed work on Toybox, starting with relicensing from the GPL-2.0-only license to the BSD-2-Clause license [11] [12] with the goal of superseding the Android command line implementation. [13]
At the beginning of 2012, Sony employee Tim Bird suggested creating a permissively licensed alternative to BusyBox. [6] In March 2013, the project was relicensed to an even more permissive 0BSD license. [14]
At the end of 2014, Toybox was integrated into the Android 6.0.x "Marshmallow" development branches for use on devices. [15] [8] [16] In 2018, a host Toybox prebuilt was added to AOSP to help make the Android build itself more hermetic. [17]
In January 2012 the proposal of creating a BSD license alternative to the GPL licensed BusyBox project drew harsh criticism from Matthew Garrett for taking away the only relevant tool for copyright enforcement of the Software Freedom Conservancy group. [18] Rob Landley, who had started the BusyBox-based lawsuits, responded that this was intentional, explaining that the lawsuits had not benefited the project but that they had led to corporate avoidance, expressing a desire to stop the lawsuits "in whatever way I see fit". [19] [20] [21]
The official Toybox documentation lists an overview of the available, partially available, and missing commands. [22] As of November 2021, Version 0.8.6 achieves approximately 80% of the project's implementation goals targeted for 1.0. [23]
The C shell is a Unix shell created by Bill Joy while he was a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been widely distributed, beginning with the 2BSD release of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) which Joy first distributed in 1978. Other early contributors to the ideas or the code were Michael Ubell, Eric Allman, Mike O'Brien and Jim Kulp.
In computer programming, standard streams are preconnected input and output communication channels between a computer program and its environment when it begins execution. The three input/output (I/O) connections are called standard input (stdin), standard output (stdout) and standard error (stderr). Originally I/O happened via a physically connected system console, but standard streams abstract this. When a command is executed via an interactive shell, the streams are typically connected to the text terminal on which the shell is running, but can be changed with redirection or a pipeline. More generally, a child process inherits the standard streams of its parent process.
In computing, a loadable kernel module (LKM) is an object file that contains code to extend the running kernel, or so-called base kernel, of an operating system. LKMs are typically used to add support for new hardware and/or filesystems, or for adding system calls. When the functionality provided by an LKM is no longer required, it can be unloaded in order to free memory and other resources.
In Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a file descriptor is a process-unique identifier (handle) for a file or other input/output resource, such as a pipe or network socket.
BusyBox is a software suite that provides several Unix utilities in a single executable file. It runs in a variety of POSIX environments such as Linux, Android, and FreeBSD, although many of the tools it provides are designed to work with interfaces provided by the Linux kernel. It was specifically created for embedded operating systems with very limited resources. The authors dubbed it "The Swiss Army knife of Embedded Linux", as the single executable replaces basic functions of more than 300 common commands. It is released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2, after controversially deciding not to move to version 3.
The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU software containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on Unix-like operating systems.
These tables provide a comparison of operating systems, of computer devices, as listing general and technical information for a number of widely used and currently available PC or handheld operating systems. The article "Usage share of operating systems" provides a broader, and more general, comparison of operating systems that includes servers, mainframes and supercomputers.
The proc filesystem (procfs) is a special filesystem in Unix-like operating systems that presents information about processes and other system information in a hierarchical file-like structure, providing a more convenient and standardized method for dynamically accessing process data held in the kernel than traditional tracing methods or direct access to kernel memory. Typically, it is mapped to a mount point named /proc at boot time. The proc file system acts as an interface to internal data structures about running processes in the kernel. In Linux, it can also be used to obtain information about the kernel and to change certain kernel parameters at runtime (sysctl).
GNU Readline is a software library that provides in-line editing and history capabilities for interactive programs with a command-line interface, such as Bash. It is currently maintained by Chet Ramey as part of the GNU Project.
In Linux systems, initrd
is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, to be used as part of the Linux startup process. initrd
and initramfs
refer to two different methods of achieving this. Both are commonly used to make preparations before the real root file system can be mounted.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.
sha1sum is a computer program that calculates and verifies SHA-1 hashes. It is commonly used to verify the integrity of files. It is installed by default on most Linux distributions. Typically distributed alongside sha1sum
are sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum, which use a specific SHA-2 hash function and b2sum, which uses the BLAKE2 cryptographic hash function.
chattr is the command in Linux that allows a user to set certain attributes of a file. lsattr is the command that displays the attributes of a file.
GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of the free software movement. Its tag line is "the extensible self-documenting text editor."
In Unix-like operating systems, a device file or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These special files allow an application program to interact with a device by using its device driver via standard input/output system calls. Using standard system calls simplifies many programming tasks, and leads to consistent user-space I/O mechanisms regardless of device features and functions.
The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses or copyleft that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.
"Everything is a file" is an idea that Unix, and its derivatives, handle input/output to and from resources such as documents, hard-drives, modems, keyboards, printers and even some inter-process and network communications as simple streams of bytes exposed through the filesystem name space. Exceptions include semaphores, processes and threads.
Bionic is an implementation of the standard C library, developed by Google for its Android operating system. It differs from the GNU C Library (glibc) in being designed for devices with less memory and processor power than a typical Linux system. It is a combination of new code and code from FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD released under a BSD license, rather than glibc, which uses the GNU Lesser General Public License. This difference was important in the early days of Android, when static linking was common, and since bionic has its own ABI, it can't be replaced by a different libc without breaking all existing apps.
OpenZFS is an open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager initially developed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system and now maintained by the OpenZFS Project. It supports features like data compression, data deduplication, copy-on-write clones, snapshots, and RAID-Z. It also supports the creation of virtual devices, which allows for the creation of file systems that span multiple disks.
Toybox combines the most common Linux command line utilities together into a single BSD-licensed executable. It's simple, small, fast, and reasonably standards-compliant (POSIX-2008 and LSB 4.1).
The real problem here is that the [Software Freedom Conservancy's] reliance on Busybox means that they're only able to target infringers who use that Busybox code. No significant kernel copyright holders have so far offered to allow the SFC to enforce their copyrights, with the result that enforcement action will grind to a halt as vendors move over to this Busybox replacement.
>As the ex-maintainer of busybox who STARTED those lawsuits in the first place and now HUGELY REGRETS ever having done so, I think I'm entitled to stop the lawsuits in whatever way I see fit. They never resulted in a single line of code added to the busybox repository. They HAVE resulted in more than one company exiting Linux development entirely and switching to non-Linux operating systems for their embedded products, and they're a big part of the reason behind Android's "No GPL in userspace" policy.