My BusyBox for OpenWRT

Recompile BusyBox with the following applets that are not included in OpenWrt's default BusyBox:

arping
chpasswd
cksum
diff
find (seems to be in owrt 24.10)
hostname
shred
ssty
tac
telnet
tty
xxd
pgrep
pkill
editing savehistory
and busybox applet

Binaries for TP-Link Archer C7 v2

You can download my new busybox for TP-Link Archer C7 v2 on my Releases page.

Copy it to your OpenWRT scp busybox_1.36.1-r42_mips_24kc.ipk root@sw-marion:/tmp/ and install it on your router opkg install /tmp/busybox_1.36.1-r42_mips_24kc.ipk and reboot it!

Size

Doing a ls -al overlay/upper/bin/busybox rom/bin/busybox you can know the size of BusyBox.

For busybox 1.36.1 on OpenWrt 24.10.4, its size is 20% bigger:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 393253 Jul 27 19:42 overlay/upper/bin/busybox
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 327717 Oct 19 18:37 rom/bin/busybox

I don't know why the openwrt team doesn't add these commands... but I'd like to know.

Compiling

Requirements

You need the following tools to compile OpenWrt, the package names vary between distributions. A complete list with distribution specific packages is found in the Build System Setup documentation.

Quickstart for TP-Link Archer C7 v2

For busybox 1.36.1 on OpenWrt 24.10.4

Download the SDK, untar it, mv it to a small name, and cd to it. Then run feeds to obtain all the latest package definitions and get busybox, then run usign to get a key-build, then copy .config.ow.czo (my defition of BusyBox), then make!

wget https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/24.10.4/targets/ath79/generic/openwrt-sdk-24.10.4-ath79-generic_gcc-13.3.0_musl.Linux-x86_64.tar.zst
tar -xf openwrt-sdk-24.10.4-ath79-generic_gcc-13.3.0_musl.Linux-x86_64.tar.zst
mv openwrt-sdk-24.10.4-ath79-generic_gcc-13.3.0_musl.Linux-x86_64 owrt

cd owrt
./scripts/feeds update -a
./scripts/feeds install busybox
./staging_dir/host/bin/usign -G -s ./key-build -p ./key-build.pub -c "Local build key"

# stop here for devel

perl -i -pe 's,^PKG_RELEASE:=.*$,PKG_RELEASE:=42,' package/feeds/base/busybox/Makefile
cp ../.config.ow.czo .config
make package/busybox/compile

The package is in bin/packages/mips_24kc/base/busybox_1.36.1-r42_mips_24kc.ipk.

Development

Start from Quickstart and then

backup:

cd ..
rsync -av owrt/ ooo
cd owrt

and:

make menuconfig

In the config, choose:

Base system -->
    [*] Customize busybox options -->
    Settings  -->
        [*] Include busybox applet
    Coreutils  -->
        [*] cksum (4.1 kb) (NEW)

then at line ~4000, CONFIG_BUSYBOX_CONFIG_HAVE_DOT_CONFIG=y, and go for diff!

vimdiff .config ../.config.ow.czo

Make

perl -i -pe 's,^PKG_RELEASE:=.*$,PKG_RELEASE:=30,' package/feeds/base/busybox/Makefile
cp -f ../.config.ow.czo .config
make package/busybox/compile

OpenWrt links

Documentation

• Quick Start Guide
• User Guide
• Developer Documentation
• Technical Reference

Support Community

• Forum: For usage, projects, discussions and hardware advise.
• Support Chat: Channel #openwrt on oftc.net.

Developer Community

• Bug Reports: Report bugs in OpenWrt
• Dev Mailing List: Send patches
• Dev Chat: Channel #openwrt-devel on oftc.net.

License

OpenWrt is licensed under GPL-2.0