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Live Q&A - Revolutionizing Embedded with WebAssembly-based Containerization
Stephen Berard - atym - Watch Now - EOC 2025 - Duration: 34:26
Thanks for attending the talk. As mentioned, our reference RTOS today is Zephyr which we can support on several hardware platforms and instruction sets. That said, our runtime is designed to be portable to other platforms as well. We already have a Linux port in progress and have received a few asks for other OSes as well. If there is a specific project and/or platform you'd like to see supported, please reach out to us. We'd love to learn more.
9:21 subtitles say "In this way, Oka extends to container model" but Oka→Ocre. Are the subtitles AI generated? (maybe by OpenAI whisper? or maybe something else... could try Tesseract OVR perhaps. Not sure what the WASM subtitles are generated by, probably JavaScript in this generation?)
Hey Peter! Yes, the subtitles were generated using an AI tool as part of an experiment we ran on a few talks. As you noticed, the transcripts aren’t perfect, and we appreciate your patience with the occasional error.
For now, please assume that “Oka” or “Okr” means “Ocre,” and “atom” refers to “atym.”
OCR?
To start with I skipped this presentation, thinking webAs... no that sounds like something for BIG embedded devices. But had some idle time and decided to give it a look, and am I glad I did that :-)
Even though it targets devices way smaller than I imagined, It's probably too big for my current project. But definitely within range for future ones.
I did take a look at atym.io, because I wanted to know more about the HW requirements, sorry to say that website is too much value selling marketing, for me to navigate. But maybe you can answer some of the questions. You mentioned memory requirements, but are there other requirements like memory manager or the like?
How is it delivered, do I get a binary that i have to flash, and only works on the CPU's you support or is it source or?
You also mention hardware abstraction. Will I depend on you to deliver drivers, or can i add/modify them myself. And where are they placed in the orcre architecture?
And last what is the licensing model?
Thank you for the interest in the solution. Here are the answers to your questions:
- A memory manager is not required. Since isolated containers can only address their assigned memory, a MMU is not needed to protect the entire memory space. In effect, our runtime provides a "soft MMU" and is one of the benefits of Ocre and its ability to extend to devices without MMU like MCUs. On platforms that have an MMU or other memory protection hardware we can take advantage of these.
- We offer ready to deploy binary runtimes for supported devices. We are working to expand our supported device list to include common platforms that are readily available. For other platforms and custom hardware, we can work with you to implement a runtime for a specific requirement, or you can license the source and implement yourself.
- The starting point for drivers is what comes with the OS in the runtime - for Ocre that would be what comes with Zephyr. Custom drivers can be added in the OS layer of the runtime.
- The licensing model for the Atym solution is based on a subscription to the Atym Hub (platform).
Would be happy to discuss any of this in more detail if you would like to reach our directly.
Excellent presentation!
Intriguing!
16:03:12 From Keith J to Everyone: how well is actually real time supported with containers? 16:06:13 From Viktor to Everyone: Hello Could you compare Ocre based containers and MicroEJ apps ? 16:06:38 From Keith J to Everyone: k thx 16:11:56 From Viktor to Everyone: Yes tnx 16:12:09 From Jason Shepherd to Everyone: Another fundamental difference is that the Ocre runtime is open source with vendor-neutral governance (through the Linux Foundation), whereas the MicroEJ runtime is proprietary. 16:14:53 From Viktor to Everyone: In the demo the examples were executed in a well prepared DevContainer environment. Is there a repo that we can clone to reproduce your examples in the demo or it is not public? 16:17:08 From Viktor to Everyone: Great! That is why it is interesting to take a look on this DevContainer environment) I'll contact you then ) Tnx 16:20:48 From Viktor to Everyone: Is there a way to run Ocre containers in a web browser? 16:24:03 From Jason Mitchell to Everyone: Do you have any information on the performance and overhead of using Ocre/Atym? 16:33:22 From Keith J to Everyone: Thanks Stephen 16:35:33 From Viktor to Everyone: Thanks!
Really interesting. I have used webassembly to port tricky C code into browsers, but have never considered it for runtime. Supported platforms might be challenging (x86 on vxworks), but definitely intertesting