Busy Box alternatives

[KHartley]

Hey everyone,

I've found myself stuck with my current document, Creating an MPI cluster with myRIO. When i configure the build for MPI the configuration scripts errors out that the ar function doesn't support the mod c, r, and u. I'm trying to approach it from two(three) sides, 1. see if I can find a replacment for the busy box functionality, 2. the impact on MPI if I don't have a archive utility 3. if I can add another utility to the configure script. I've already emailed the mailing list over at mpich to see if there is any impacts on not having a archive utility or if there are any utilities that people would recommend for a armv7a processor.

So I ask you does anyone have any alternatives for busy box if a function doesn't do what you want?

Hasn't anyone taking the time to add functionality to the busy box source?

Any recommendations on expanding the ar functionality (haven't googled yet please forgive me)? shell script overload?

Thanks,

Kyle H.

[Zach J]

Hey Kyle,

BusyBox is kind of a de-facto standard unfortunately.  There are a lot of replacement functions for certain commands that extend functionality, but for the most part you are locked to BusyBox.  There is an initiative to create a non-GPL alternative to BusyBox, but most of it is based on the fact that BusyBox is a heavily-litigated software stack.  Check out this link.  It covers some of the in-development alternatives to BusyBox...and if you have specific functions you are trying to work with, I might be able to suggest some other alternative functions. 

Additionally, you might be able to look into different shells (ZSH, CSH, etc) to see if they have any in-built functionalities you are looking for.  Each shell has it's own functionality and scripting functions, so you might find what you need that way.

Regards,

Zach J.

[BradM · Accepted solution]

Well, the short answer to the question would be to install the binutils-symlinks package (depends on the binutils package, symlinks the architecture-prefixed binaries to their more commonly-named location).

I am unfamiliar with the MPI package, so I can only speculate what the impact would be, based on what the tool does. I would expect that ar is required when building the components since it is a commonly-used tool for creating static libraries, so if there is an option to configure the MPI libraries to be static, I would imagine that functionality is lost. I suppose that the system could rely on ar for compressing data that is to be sent to other systems, but there are better, more commonly-used compression libraries for that task.

I think it makes sense to see what the MPI folks have to say, but in reality the first question's answer will address the problem so the rest becomes moot.