Busybox for AVR32 Linux

BusyBox is a single binary implementing many of the basic commands you'll find on any Linux system, for example ls, cat, grep, etc. It is extremely configurable, so it's especially suited for small systems where you only want to include the bare minimum of functionality, but it's also full-featured enough to be used on a development system.

BusyBox Binary

* busybox-1.8.2-avr32-bin.tar.bz2: Busybox 1.8.2 binary for AVR32

Building BusyBox

The source code for the latest version of BusyBox can be downloaded from http://www.busybox.net/downloads/. No patches are necessary for it to work on AVR32.

The latest BusyBox builds like the kernel. Configuring it can be done like this:

make ARCH=avr32 CROSS_COMPILE=avr32-linux- KBUILD_HAVE_NLS=yes xconfig (or with the text based menuconfig)

Compile like this:

make ARCH=avr32 CROSS_COMPILE=avr32-linux- KBUILD_HAVE_NLS=yes

Configure BusyBox by running make menuconfig and select the features you need. Make sure you select avr32-linux- as cross-compiler prefix. It's probably a good idea to use the attached example configuration as a starting point. Just save it to the BusyBox source directory and rename it .config.

Build the busybox program by running make and install it to the location specified during the configuration stage by running make install.

Tested versions

• BusyBox 1.2.1

Usage

To see a list of all the individual programs supported by your particular busybox binary, simply run busybox with no arguments. The programs should behave just like the regular system utilities included with other Linux distributions.

Setting up mdev

mdev is a small replacement for udev, used by most modern Linux distributions to manage the special files under /dev. To use it, add the following lines to your start-up script:

mount -ttmpfs mdev /dev
mkdir /dev/shm
chmod 01777 /dev/shm
mkdir /dev/pts
mount -tdevpts pts /dev/pts

echo /sbin/mdev > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug
/sbin/mdev -s

After doing this, all necessary device files will be created automatically as they appear. Note, however, that ALSA expects to find its device files under /dev/snd, and mdev doesn't currently support creating device files in subdirectories. A possible workaround is to create /dev/snd as a symlink pointing back to the /dev directory.

Links

• BusyBox web page

* dot-config: Full-featured BusyBox 1.8.2 dot-config