Container Management Frameworkfor WebAssembly-Based EmbeddedSystems

Sammanfattning

Embedded Linux systems often struggle when running containerized applicationsbecause traditional container platforms like Docker require a lot of system re-sources. WebAssembly (Wasm) provides a lighter and more secure way to runapplications, but there are still few mature tools for managing the full lifecycle ofWasm-based containers on embedded devices. This thesis designs, implements and evaluates a lightweight container manage-ment framework for embedded Linux systems using the WebAssembly Micro Run-time (WAMR). The framework is written in C++ and includes a command-line in-terface that allows users to create, start, stop, delete, list and monitor containers.Each container runs in its own isolated thread, while a central manager handleslifecycle operations. The framework was tested in a simulated embedded environment with 1 virtualCPU (vCPU) and 1 GB of Random Access Memory (RAM) over 50 runs. Startuptime was measured using high-resolution timers and memory usage was trackedusing PID statistics tool (pidstat). The results show an average startup time of7.92 milliseconds (with a standard deviation of 0.28 ms) and a memory usage of5.4 megabytes (MB) per container. Both results are well within the set limits of500 ms for startup time and 15 MB for memory usage. All functional requirements were also verified through command-line testing. Over-all, the results show that a Wasm-based container management system is bothpractical and efficient for resource-constrained embedded systems and it providesa solid foundation for future Internet of Things (IoT) applications.