{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/minimal-virtual-machines-on-iot","title":"Minimal Virtual Machines on IoT Microcontrollers: The Case of Berkeley Packet Filters with rBPF","arxiv_id":"2011.12047","date":"2020-11-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Koen Zandberg","Emmanuel Baccelli"],"abstract":"Virtual machines (VM) are widely used to host and isolate software modules. However, extremely small memory and low-energy budgets have so far prevented wide use of VMs on typical microcontroller-based IoT devices. In this paper, we explore the potential of two minimal VM approaches on such low-power hardware. We design rBPF, a register-based VM based on extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF). We compare it with a stack-based VM based on WebAssembly (Wasm) adapted for embedded systems. We implement prototypes of each VM, hosted in the IoT operating system RIOT. We perform measurements on commercial off-the-shelf IoT hardware. Unsurprisingly, we observe that both Wasm and rBPF virtual machines yield execution time and memory overhead, compared to not using a VM. We show however that this execution time overhead is tolerable for low-throughput, low-energy IoT devices. We further show that, while using a VM based on Wasm entails doubling the memory budget for a simple networked IoT application using a 6LoWPAN/CoAP stack, using a VM based on rBPF requires only negligible memory overhead (less than 10% more memory). rBPF is thus a promising approach to host small software modules, isolated from OS software, and updatable on-demand, over low-power networks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.12047v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.12047v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"minimal-virtual-machines-on-iot","repo_url":"https://github.com/future-proof-iot/femto-container_tutorials","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}