BusyBox 1.36 Released With SeedRNG, Many Other Additions

It's been one year and a few days since BusyBox 1.35 was released while today it's been succeeded by BusyBox 1.36 for this software package that is common to embedded Linux environments with the lone executable providing a plethora of commands and functionality.

BusyBox 1.36 has a ton of changes that have accumulated over development the past year. Some of the BusyBox 1.36 highlights include:

- Adding seedrng to BusyBox for the SeedRNG utility for kernel random number generator (RNG) seed files. Jason Donenfeld added SeedRNG to BusyBox after "virtually every single Busybox-based distro I have seen seeds things in wrong, incomplete, or otherwise dangerous way. For example, fixing this issue in Buildroot requires first for Busybox to have this fix." The SeedRNG is a simple program for seeding the Linux kernel random number generator using seed files.

- BusyBox has added a tsort implementation for performing a topological sort on its input.

- Adding of the tree command for listing directories and files in a tree structure.

- BusyBox now prefers compiling with the -Oz optimization level rather than -Os. This is preferred since -Oz optimizes more aggressively for size rather than speed.

- Various options added to existing BusyBox commands like -h for sort, -o for xargs, -s for ed, and others.

- Optional x86 hardware-accelerated hashing for SHA1 and SHA256.

- Support for setting the PATH in crontab files.

- Various fixes to its vi implementation.

- BusyBox's fdisk now recognizes Embedded Base Root Requirements (EBBR) partitions.

Downloads and more details on the BusyBox 1.36 release via busybox.net.