A quantitative analysis of aspects in the eCos kernel

Nearly ten years after its first presentation and five years after its first application to operating systems, the suitability of AspectOriented Programming (AOP) for the development of operating system kernels is still highly in dispute. While the AOP advocacy emphasizes the benefits of AOP towards better configurability and maintainability of system software, most kernel developers express a sound skepticism regarding the thereby induced runtime and memory costs: Operating system kernels have to be lean and efficient. We have analyzed the runtime and memory costs of aspects in general, on the level of µ-benchmarks, and by refactoring and extending the eCos operating system kernel using AspectC++, an AOP extension to the C++ language. Our results show that most AOP features do not induce a intrinsic overhead and that the actual overhead induced by AspectC++ is very low. We have also analyzed a test case with significant aspect-related costs. This example shows how the structu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: EUROSYS
• Authors: Daniel Lohmann, Fabian Scheler, Reinhard Tartler, Olaf Spinczyk, Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat
• Keywords: AOP Advocacy, AOP Extension, AOP Features, EUROSYS 2006, System Software