Article

A quantitative analysis of aspects in the eCos kernel

Authors:

Daniel Lohmann,

Fabian Scheler,

Reinhard Tartler,

Wolfgang Schröder-PreikschatAuthors Info & Claims

EuroSys '06: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2006

Pages 191 - 204

https://doi.org/10.1145/1217935.1217954

Published: 18 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Nearly ten years after its first presentation and five years after its first application to operating systems, the suitability of Aspect-Oriented 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 structure of the underlying kernel can have a negative impact on aspect implementations and how these costs can be avoided by an aspect-aware design.Based on this analysis, our conclusion is that AOP is suitable for the development of operating system kernels and other kinds of highly efficient infrastructure software.

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Zaidi YNisar MKhan RHamid A(2024)A Modular Distributed Operating System Architecture for Scalable Mesh Topologies2024 International Conference on Emerging Trends in Smart Technologies (ICETST)10.1109/ICETST62952.2024.10737937(1-5)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2024
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Index Terms

A quantitative analysis of aspects in the eCos kernel
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Embedded software
      2. Real-time systems software

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

EuroSys '06: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2006

April 2006

420 pages

ISBN:1595933220

DOI:10.1145/1217935

Conference Chair:
Yolande Berbers
K. U. Leuven, Belgium
,
Program Chair:
Willy Zwaenepoel
EPFL

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 40, Issue 4
Proceedings of the 2006 EuroSys conference
October 2006
383 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/1218063
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Copyright © 2006 Authors.

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SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 18 April 2006

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April 18 - 21, 2006

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Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 1,308 submissions, 18%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/ICETST62952.2024.10737937
Krüger JBerger T(2020)Activities and costs of re-engineering cloned variants into an integrated platformProceedings of the 14th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems10.1145/3377024.3377044(1-10)Online publication date: 5-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3377024.3377044
Fenske WKruger JKanyshkova MSchulze S(2020)#ifdef Directives and Program Comprehension: The Dilemma between Correctness and Preference2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00033(255-266)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00033
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