Development, deployment and maintenance of networked software has been revolutionized by DevOps practices, which boost system software quality and agile evolution. However, as the Internet of Things (IoT) connects low-power, microcontroller-based devices which take part in larger distributed cyberphysical systems, such low-power IoT devices are not easy to integrate in DevOps workflows. In this paper, we contribute to mitigate this problem by designing Femto-Containers, a new hardware-independent mechanism which enable the virtualization and isolation of software modules embedded on microcontrollers, using an approach extending and adapting Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF). We implement a Femto-Container hosting engine, which we integrate in a common low-power IoT operating system (RIOT), and is thus enhanced with the ability to start, update or terminate Femto-Containers on demand, securely over a standard IPv6/6LoWPAN network. We evaluate the performance of Femto-Containers in a variety of use cases. We show that Femto-Containers can virtualize and isolate multiple software modules executed concurrently, with very small memory footprint overhead (below 10%) and very small startup time (tens of microseconds) compared to native code execution. We carry out experiments deploying Femto-Containers on a testbed using heterogeneous IoT hardware based on the popular microcontroller architectures Arm Cortex-M, ESP32 and RISC-V. We show that compared to prior work on software-based low-power virtualization and isolation, Femto-Containers offer an attractive trade-off in terms of memory footprint, energy consumption, and security. The characteristics of Femto-Containers satisfy both the requirements of software modules hosting high-level logic coded in a variety of common programming languages, and the constraints of low-level debug snippets inserted on a hot code path.
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