TinyContainer: Access Control & Scheduling for Runtimes on Microcontrollers

The development of software containerization technologies on microcontrollers enables running multiple applications with different trust levels on resource-limited microcontrollers. However, current solutions lack fine-grained control over various resource types and flexible scheduling, limiting their applicability in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. We introduce TinyContainer, a lightweight software container management framework designed for multi-tenant microcontrollers. TinyContainer provides dynamic loading and execution of containers, per-container configurable scheduling and fine-grained access control to host resources through a metadatadriven approach, supporting multiple runtimes via a runtime abstraction layer. We demonstrate the integration of TinyContainer in a small WebAssembly runtime, CS4WAMR, running on RIOT RTOS.