A Feasibility Study on Containerization of Traditional Embedded Systems

With the arrival of information technology and the increasing popularity of electronic devices, a large number of embedded devices rush into the new production or modern engineering fields. These computing devices are working alone without a centralized use of computing power. The emergence of container technology makes the deployment and execution of applications more efficient, and the scope of migration and distribution is becoming more and more extensive. How to apply container technology to traditional embedded systems to improve the efficiency of application deployment is worth thinking. In this paper, we analyzed the characteristics of three embedded systems with the features of container technologies., and summarized the efforts needed to be made for the containerization of embedded systems. We proposed a prototype of container manager and validated the design on an existing embedded system by implementing a simple progam to parse the bundle and execute container applications. The result shows that our design can conform to the OCI specification and execute user processes correctly on the current embedded system.