Building a customizable embedded operating system with fine-grained joinpoints using the AOX programming environment

ABSTRACT

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been successful in modularizing crosscutting concerns in complex software systems. In this paper, we present our aspect-oriented approach to building a highly customizable embedded operating system. This is a challenging task since embedded operating systems consist of intertwined concerns often implemented using a mixture of multiple programming languages including an assembly language. Furthermore, they often contain hand-optimized code that makes clear modularization extremely difficult. We provide a two-step approach that addresses these difficulties. First, we devised an aspect-oriented programming environment AOX (Aspect-Oriented eXtension). It supports both modularization and customization of complex software via a set of aspect-oriented mechanisms. AOX extends existing approaches in the sense that it is entirely programming language independent and provides finegrained joinpoints. Second, using AOX, we built a customizable embedded operating system we call the HEART OS. It is highly configurable and very user-friendly. AOX has been implemented and integrated into the Eclipse IDE as a plug-in module. The HEART OS has also been implemented and ported to the XScale and x86 platforms. Our experience with AOX in building the HEART OS was very positive.

REFERENCES

• 1: Kiczales, G., Lamping, J., Mendhekar, A., Maeda, C., Lopes, C., Loingtier, J.-M., and Irwin, J. Aspect-oriented programming In Proceedings of ECOOP, 1997, 220--242.
• 2: Nagy, I., Bergmans, L., and Aksit, M. Composing Aspects at Shared Join Points. In Proceedings of NODe, 2005.
• 3: William G. Griswold , Kevin Sullivan , Yuanyuan Song , Macneil Shonle , Nishit Tewari , Yuanfang Cai , Hridesh Rajan, Modular Software Design with Crosscutting Interfaces, IEEE Software, v.23 n.1, p.51-60, January 2006 [doi>10.1109/MS.2006.24]
• 4: Eaddy, M. and Aho, A. Statement Annotations for Fine-Grained Advising. In Proceedings of RAM-SE, 2006.
• 5: Kouhei Sakurai , Hidehiko Masuhara, Test-based pointcuts for robust and fine-grained join point specification, Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, March 31-April 04, 2008, Brussels, Belgium [doi>10.1145/1353482.1353494]
• 6: Terry Hon , Gregor Kiczales, Fluid AOP join point models, Companion to the 21st ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1176617.1176687]
• 7: Jarzabek, S. Software Reuse Beyond Components with XVCL. In Proceedings of GTTSE, 2007.
• 8: Mark C. Chu-Carroll , James Wright , Annie T. T. Ying, Visual separation of concerns through multidimensional program storage, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.188-197, March 17-21, 2003, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/643603.643623]
• 9: Martin P. Robillard , Gail C. Murphy, Representing concerns in source code, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.16 n.1, p.3-es, February 2007 [doi>10.1145/1189748.1189751]
• 10: Yoshiyuki Usui , Shigeru Chiba, Bugdel: An Aspect-Oriented Debugging System, Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, p.790-795, December 15-17, 2005 [doi>10.1109/APSEC.2005.48]
• 11: Yvonne Coady , Gregor Kiczales, Back to the future: a retroactive study of aspect evolution in operating system code, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, p.50-59, March 17-21, 2003, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/643603.643609]
• 12: Daniel Lohmann , Jochen Streicher , Olaf Spinczyk , Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat, Interrupt synchronization in the CiAO operating system: experiences from implementing low-level system policies by AOP, Proceedings of the 6th workshop on Aspects, components, and patterns for infrastructure software, p.6-es, March 12-16, 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/1233901.1233907]
• 13: Yoshisato Yanagisawa , Kenichi Kourai , Shigeru Chiba, A dynamic aspect-oriented system for OS kernels, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1173706.1173717]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Management

Keywords:
AOP, fine-granularity, language independence, operating systems