Customizing BusyBox

BusyBox is a key component of most embedded Linux-based projects as it provides an alternative with a smaller footprint when compared to the usual Linux counterparts for the most commonly used utilities. It can be seen as a Swiss knife since it provides a huge set of utilities and is quite flexible regarding which utilities to enable or disable. Poky provides a default setting for BusyBox, and it sometimes may not fulfill our needs; so, changing this configuration is a common task. For example, the <layer>/recipes-core/busybox/busybox_1.22.1.bbappend file could have the following lines of code:

FILESEXTRAPATHS_prepend := "${THISDIR}/${PN}:" 
SRC_URI += "file://enable-tftpd.cfg" 

The <layer>/recipes-core/busybox/busybox/enable-tftpd.cfg file contains the following:

CONFIG_TFTPD=y 

This combination of the .bbappend file and configuration file is enough to enable support for the TFTP server in BusyBox.

Tip

For the cases when we want to deselect an option, we can add...