slimbox

busybox like project; a paired down version of the gnu tools in on big binary.

since golang is so good at making tiny binaries, I decided to call it slimbox

Really tring to do this TDD - and that has resulted in a couple rewrites as I learn better ways of doing the problem and tdd in its domain.

Limitations

This is about 5x -20x slower than gnu or busybox. There are some dubious things like wc paralellizing out when the bottleneck is in all likelyhood storage iops not cpu (done non-practical purposes; should be cleaned out).

That said: I intend to improve performance after I get through the first 2 sections and before I get to runlevel, init and modprobe

design goals

libraries

I want to stay stdlib only as much as possible; the major exception is the use of pflags. There may be non-stdlib as I get to more interesting things with network stack or crypto.

targeted system

I'm just targeting desktop linux right now.

Layout

├── cmd                 // stand alone binary for each command
│   ├── cat
│   │   └── cat_main.go
│   ├── false
│   │   └── false_main.go
│   ├── true
│   │   └── true_main.go
│   └── wc
│       └── wc_main.go
├── lib                 // command logic is in reusable library
│   ├── cat
│   ├── falsy
│   ├── truthy
│   └── wc
├── LICENSE
├── main.go             // fat binary with subcommands main
└── README.md

implemented

See [https://gitlab.com/yarbelk/slimbox/-/boards](kanban board) for where we are. I want some basic functionality and simple apps and sh such as:

• cat
• wc
• true
• false
• sh
• yes
• cp
• mv
• rm
• ls

Part way through this I intend to implement signal handling as well; once i'm comfortable with how the various programs are structured then i want some more interesting ones like:

• df
• dd
• ps
• reboot
• time // this is fun because it needs to be consistent
• mkfifo
• login
• sort
• uniq
• test

Then the fun ones:

• exec
• init
• runlevel (no idea if i will do this because: its a deap rabit hole)
• modprobe