Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020

Containers are incredibly convenient to package applications and deploy them quickly across the data center. This talk will introduce RunX, a new project under LF Edge that aims at bringing containers to the edge with extra benefits. At the core, RunX is an OCI-compatible containers runtime to run software packaged as containers as Xen micro-VMs. RunX allows traditional containers to be executed with minimal overhead as virtual machines, providing additional isolation and real-time support. It also introduces new types of containers designed with edge and embedded deployments in mind. RunX enables RTOSes, and baremetal apps to be packaged as containers, delivered to the target using the powerful containers infrastructure, and deployed at runtime as Xen micro-VMs. Physical resources can be dynamically assigned to them, such as accelerators and FPGA blocks. This presentation will go through the architecture of RunX and the new deployment scenarios it enables. It will provide an overview of the integration with Yocto Project via the meta-virtualization layer and describe how to build a complete system with Xen and RunX. The presentation will come with a demo on a Raspberry Pi 4.