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BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

busybox.net

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Re: BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

#11

Post by sylware »

I use busybox with a minimal init process, _REALLY_ minimal, which is beyond enough for a desktop.

Minimal init is super stable in time, rock solid, code is close to zero, aka near 0 maintenance, doing a good enough job.

But, GNU with some of its minions is waging war on busybox: for instance the steam client is not distributing a static ELF64 of bash (and it could easily), but does distribute _mandatory_ bash and not sh scripts, and those scripts are carefull of using GNU command only niche options... but the main steam client binary seems about to kill those script abominations... hopefully... but that steam client binary is a ELF32 binary expecting x11/GL... oooh god... (it should be a super clean ELF64 binary: only glibc libs in NEEDED entries with a 2017-2019 manual ABI selection, dynamically loading system interface sharde libs, and without too brain damaged or recent ELF relocations (aka serious professional elf/linux binary crafting).

Re: BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

#14

Post by mgaunard »

One thing I found interesting recently while working with cloud instances (I usually work with traditional datacenters), is that those things boot extremely slowly.

The whole point of those new complex init systems was to boot faster. It definitely works for my desktop or laptop, but apparently not so much with the cloud.

If it's not gonna boot fast, I don't see the point of replacing straightforward shell scripts.

Re: BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

#15

Post by arnaudsm »

mkoubaa wrote: post #9
frizlab wrote: post #6

[flagged]

There are lot of things that are bizarrely still hard in 2024. Formatting floating points as strings with maximum precision, for example. I sometimes find myself rooting for another AI winter so that more talented computer scientists have nothing better to do than to go back and clean up these messes

No one ever got promoted for reducing tech debt. It's better to ship fast and forget, and cash out before the system collapses years later.

Unfortunately this is not exclusive to software.

Re: BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

#17

Post by megous »

ksp-atlas wrote: post #10
tapoxi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Busybox is designed for extremely minimalist and embedded use cases, so they have a legitimate reason for avoiding systemd as a dependency.

I made a small busybox based statically compiled distro which used busybox init, busybox init is basically just a bunch of shell scripts

Busybox init is a binary. It can run anything (based on /etc/inittab) incl. other binaries. There's no need for it to run shell scripts (other than /etc/inittab lines which are executed under `sh -c "..."`).

Re: BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

#18

Post by _kb »

mkoubaa wrote: post #9
frizlab wrote: post #6

[flagged]

There are lot of things that are bizarrely still hard in 2024. Formatting floating points as strings with maximum precision, for example. I sometimes find myself rooting for another AI winter so that more talented computer scientists have nothing better to do than to go back and clean up these messes

At least we've moved past hash-collision heaters and integrity checks of monkey picture URLs.

Re: BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

#19

Post by mananaysiempre »

mkoubaa wrote: post #9
frizlab wrote: post #6

[flagged]

There are lot of things that are bizarrely still hard in 2024. Formatting floating points as strings with maximum precision, for example. I sometimes find myself rooting for another AI winter so that more talented computer scientists have nothing better to do than to go back and clean up these messes

> Formatting floating points as strings with maximum precision, for example.

That’s not hard to do[1]—rather, it’s hard to do fast (that is, without treating your CPU as a fast 8-bitter, which it sucks at being, comparatively speaking). The other direction is surprisingly difficult, though[2].

[1] https://research.swtch.com/ftoa

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3296979.3192369

Re: BusyBox: Life Without Systemd (2018)

#20

Post by nona »

I've seen quite a bit of systemd-free embedded distributions (like OpenWrt et al).

But I'd like to see more general-purpose embedded-focused distribution with systemd. The only ones I know about are the special-purpose LibreELEC/Jelos/Rocknix/Lakka variants.

It'd be nice to see such a distribution, but with proper package management. I was hoping https://distr1.org/ would become this, but it seems like it's been more or less abandoned.

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