BusyBox on FreeBSD and Hurd

[Jérémie Koenig <jk@jk.fr.eu.org>]

Hi all,

My proposal[1] to port Debian-Installer to Hurd as a "Google Summer of
Code" project has been accepted. As one of the first steps I have been
working on porting BusyBox.

I would like to suggest that we come up with a common set of changes
for both FreeBSD and Hurd support and submit them upstream. With this
in mind, I have been working against the upstream git repository, and
have tried to incorporate both the previous Hurd patch[2] from Samuel
Thibault and the Debian/kFreeBSD ones[3].

My changes are published on github[4]. I have backported them onto
BusyBox 1.15.3 and successfully built a debian package including them
on Hurd and Linux.

Could you have a look and tell me what you think? In particular I have
not been able to test my code on kFreeBSD yet, so any kind of report
would be great.

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2010/HurdDebianInstaller/JeremieKoenig
[2] http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/
[3] http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/d-i/people/slackydeb/kfreebsd/busybox/1.14/debian/
[4] http://github.com/jeremie-koenig/busybox-osports

Quick start
-----------

$ git clone git://github.com/jeremie-koenig/busybox-osports.git
$ cd busybox-osports
$ make allyesconfig
$ vi .config # disable PLATFORM_LINUX, STATIC and WERROR
$ make

or, alternatively,

$ git clone git://github.com/jeremie-koenig/busybox-osports.git
$ cd busybox-osports
$ git checkout osports-debian
$ fakeroot debian/rules binary

Summary
-------

I list my changes below. The related kFreeBSD patches are shown within
square brackets. I took the approach of defining a new configuration
option (PLATFORM_LINUX) that the Linux-specific applets can depend on.
This way only a minimal amount of configuration overriding has to take
place for Hurd and FreeBSD in the debian package.

Some patches have been already included upstream:

fbedacf Hurd compat fixes. Mostly dealing with absent PATH_MAX
[libbb.xconnect.diff]
3d0e779 libbb: locate PAGE_SIZE on Hurd
1d448cf provide safe_gethostname() for non-linux systems
[libbb.safe_gethostname.diff]

The rest is in the 'osports' branch in the github repository:

9a47e16 update scripts/kconfig/*_shipped
81f0baa readlink: use xmalloc_realpath()
92fbcd8 mark Linux-specific configuration options
7a23db4 init,loginutils: termios portability fixes
fa5c73c init,halt: portability improvements [init.init.diff]
250e48a init: make the initial $TERM value configurable
b5065d9 libbb.h: add device names for Hurd and FreeBSD [include.libbb.diff]
3b6b59b mkdir: fix -p on FreeBSD [libbb.make_directory.diff]
7317803 klogd: support /dev/klog in addition to klogctl() [klogd.diff]
8749e88 libbb: conditionalize AF_* usage in error reporting
19efa4d stty: fix undefined IDX_* on missing termios constants
c835163 cttyhack: serial console detection is Linux-specific
[shell.cttyhack.diff]
        /!\ The serial console detection is just dropped
73a49cc bootchartd: mounting tmpfs is Linux-specific
fd2a956 tcpsvd,udpsvd: conditionalize usage of SO_ORIGINAL_DST
2f6b52d vlock: disable linux console calls on other systems

Stuff I will be working on soon:

* mount/umount
    FreeBSD: [mount_with_hack_to_help_umount.diff] [util-linux.umount.diff]
    Hurd: issue a 'settrans' command
* swapon/swapoff:
    FreeBSD: [util-linux.swaponoff.diff]
    Hurd: to be investigated

Branches
--------

* osports: the main branch, based on upstream's 'master' branch;
* osports-1.15.3: the same changes, rebased onto BusyBox 1.15.3;
* osports-debian: a preliminary debian package including them.
  (we still need to somehow set INIT_TERMINAL_TYPE)

Thanks,
--
Jérémie Koenig <jk@jk.fr.eu.org>
http://jk.fr.eu.org/