You Can Now Use Containers with Zephyr OS
What you'll learn:
- What are containers?
- Why aren’t containers part of Zephyr yet?
- How can I use containers on Zephyr?
Containers represent an operating system-level virtualization approach that’s popular on higher-end operating systems like Linux and Microsoft Windows. Linux containers, which come in numerous implementations, are designed to provide portable, self-contained, isolated solutions. They have been popularized by implementations like Docker and Podman. Containers are also used to distribute applications and tools.
The Zephyr Project is a compact, open-source, real-time operating system (RTOS) that targets embedded systems, especially connected IO applications. The project provides an array of features, but containers haven’t been an available feature — until now.
Atym provides container support in this resource-constrained, edge-computing environment (see figure). It’s built on WebAssembly (WASM) and works on systems with as little as 256 kB of memory. In the video above, Dan Kouba, Atym’s Senior Solutions Architect, breaks down the details and benefits offered by the system.
WebAssembly is a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment that defines a virtual-machine environment like a JavaScript virtual machine (JVM). A WebAssembly environment can actually be implemented using a JVM. WASM makes it possible to integrate isolation and security without hardware virtualization.
The system consists of the Atym Runtime, the Atym Hub, and user-developed containers. Containerized applications can be written in a host of popular programming languages such as C, C++, GoLang, and Rust.
Containers have proven useful in supporting remote updates, zero-trust security, and remote monitoring and debugging. With their modular architecture, developers are able to exploit and build on existing containers that can be configured to communicate with each other.
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About the Author
William G. Wong
Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF
I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.
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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.
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