Feasibility of Application Containers in Embedded Real-Time Linux
Lammi, Toni Juhani · Tampere University of Technology Institutional Repository · 2018
Virtualization offers many benefits like information security and compatibility issue fixing. This technology is, however, not traditionally used in embedded systems due to the overhead it produces. Today’s embedded systems have more processing power than the systems in the past and container technology provides a low overhead solution for virtualization making virtualization possible for embedded devices. The aim of this thesis was to study the feasibility of container-based virtualization in embedded real-time Linux. The test system was an embedded real-time Linux device used for Internet-of-Things solutions. The container technology used in the thesis was Docker. Docker was chosen as it has a comprehensive documentation and has been broadly adopted by the industry. The feasibility was studied by measuring the performance and comparing these results to other studies and reading information security and software management documentation. The performance measurements considered POSIX inter-process communication latency, memory consumption and mass storage usage. The measurements were performed with both containerized and non-containerized systems to contrast the results. Information security and software management aspects were studied by inspecting documentation. The measurements showed that the latency is not affected by the virtualization, memory consumption is slightly larger and the mass storage usage is considerably larger and should be taken into account when planning the virtualization. Containers were also perceived to help with information security and make software management easier. The information security of the containers should not, however, be carelessly trusted.