[BusyBox] Kernel compiling with busybox

[Thomas Cameron]

Sean,

	These are not bugs, or errors.  Perhaps some of the issues could
be resolved by recompiling busybox's tools with all of their options,
but for the most part, this is to be expected.

	Some of what makes busybox so small is tighter code than the
full blown version of the utils it replaces, but most of it is stripped
functionality.  You should expect tools to be missing some of the more
rarely used functions, as the are _usually_ not critical.

	Unfortunately, compiling a kernel is a fairly complicated task
for a system to undertake.  Many tools are used that are either rarely
used otherwise, or simply archaic.  Just the nature of the beast, I am
afraid.

Good luck,
Thomas Cameron
CEI Systems, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Graham [mailto:sgraham at rogers.com] 
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2003 5:23 PM
To: busybox at busybox.net
Subject: [BusyBox] Kernel compiling with busybox

Hello everyone!

First off, just wanted to say how great I think this project is.

Secondly, I lost some hair recently while trying to compile a linux
kernel 
(2.2.16) on a system based off of busybox (BasicLinux 2.01).  It turns
out 
that (apparently?) some of the tools that busybox implements are not
done 
in the same manner of the tools that they are replacing.

For example, I had to load a real copy of gzip and gunzip because while 
trying to do a "make bzImage" for the kernel, this line failed (found in

arch/boot/compressed/Makefile)

gzip -f -9 < $$tmppiggy > $$tmppiggy.gz

This resulted in the output file ($$tmppiggy.gz) being 0 bytes long,
thus 
failing compilation.  Replacing the busybox gzip with the real gzip
caused 
that operation to complete successfully.

I had several other problems (i.e. grep, sed and find not accepting 
standard parameters) that caused quite a bit of frustration, but when I 
replaced them with standard versions everything worked fine.  Has anyone

else tried to compile a kernel using busybox tools?  I tried a quick
browse 
through the buglist and couldn't find anything that seemed to match,
which 
either means that nobody has tried, or I did something horribly wrong :)

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

-- Sean

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