BusyBox for embedded Linux systems and devices

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: August 15, 2006]

This is a nice introduction to small toolkit for small environments such as embedded devices.

BusyBox was first written by Bruce Perens in 1996 for the Debian GNU/Linux setup disk. The goal was to create a bootable GNU/Linux system on a single floppy disk that could be used as an install and rescue disk.

BusyBox is a single executable implementation of many standard Linux utilities. BusyBox contains simple utilities, such as cat and echo, as well as larger, more complex tools, such as grep, find, mount, and telnet (albeit, with fewer options than the traditional version); some refer to BusyBox as the Swiss Army knife of utilities. This article explores the purpose of BusyBox, how it works, and why it's important for memory constrained environments.