Current release notes (0.09)

Here are the most noticeable things that have happened. There's a number of new utils (6), I would like to thank H-Peter Recktenwald and Alexandr Gorlov for new utils, and Christopher Li for bugfix in dmesg. Now you can learn almost everything about your CPU with cpuinfo and cpuspeed, change your CDs with ccd, figure out extension, directory, and tty names with extname and dirname and tty respectively :)

Due to internal improvements FreeBSD binaries are smaller, and.. Yes! httpd now works on FreeBSD, and is less than 1kb !! :)

Documentation was updated, I've created Asmutils-HOWTO instead of old docs, which will contain all development- and usage-related information; I suggest all developers to read this document.

I'd like to ask and encourage everyone to stress-test this release and report bugs. I am going to make 0.10 release marked as "stable", and go for "development" release 0.11, which will break a lot of things.

Full list of utils in 0.09 release (total of 58, new are marked bold):

arch basename cat ccd chmod chroot chvt cpuinfo cpuspeed deallocvt df dirname dmesg domainname echo eject env extname factor false grep halt hostname httpd id kill ln ls lsmod lzss md5sum mkdir more mount nc poweroff ps pwd rc6crypt reboot rmdir rmdsum rmmod sleep sln softdog strings swapoff swapon sync tee true tty umount uname update wc yes

Fully functional utils:

arch basename dirname echo factor false pwd sleep sync tee true uname yes

Almost fully functional utils:

chroot dmesg mkdir sln tty wc

Please note that this functionality mainly affects command line options support; behavior is not well tested, however it SEEMS to be the same. You are especially encouraged to use and test them :) Long options like --version and --help are not supported.

What is this all about?

You can examine README file for that. For impatient people here's a piece from it.

asmutils is a set of miscellaneous utilities written in assembly language, targeted on embedded systems and small distributions (like rescue or installation disks). It features the smallest possible size and memory requirements, the fastest speed and good functionality. Currently project supports Linux and FreeBSD (BeOS support is in the works), however it is quite portable to any i386 OS.

Usual way for small system is to replace binaries with shell scripts; however, scripts require much more memory and are slow. This package provides:

1) binaries
2) that do not require libc
3) are small as scripts
4) are fast as kernel
5) need only few KBytes of RAM

feature1: the smallest http server -- 586 bytes
feature2: the smallest implementation of linear transformation with recursion -- 396 bytes
feature3: plenty of other similar pearls

Another goal of this package is to provide PORTABLE source code library, and to encourage assembly programmers to write for Linux/UNIX. Usually UNIX is associated with C, and noone wants to deal with assembly.. Browse the source, look -- it is simple. Read the docs, start to write, and you will like it; assembly programming is a lot of fun, especially when you deal with UNIX-like operating systems.

Asmutils come with NO WARRANTY of any kind, and are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. All programs in this package are COPYRIGHTED by their authors, as shown in the source code and in the CREDITS file. The bulk of code is written by Konstantin Boldyshev, with contributions of various hackers all over the world.

Does anyone use asmutils?

I was told that following distributions use asmutils:

• Small Linux uses quite a lot of them
• Turbo Linux uses them for installation disks
• Etlinux uses a couple of them
• Stampede GNU/Linux includes asmutils as .slp into distribution

May be you would like to tell me smth more? :)