The Aspect-Aware Design and Implementation of the CiAO Operating-System Family

CiAO is the first operating-system family that has been developed with AOP concepts from the very beginning. By its aspect-aware design and implementation, CiAO reaches excellent configurability, separation of concerns, and low footprints in the resulting systems that outperform leading commercial implementations. CiAO implements the automotive operating-system standard OSEK/AUTOSAR OS and provides configurability of all fundamental system properties by means of AOP. We describe the aspect-aware design approach and implementation idioms that led to this efficiency and flexibility. On the example of three larger case studies from CiAO, we demonstrate how AOP can be employed in this respect on different levels of complexity: From highly configurable, yet efficient low-level hardware abstractions over the implementation of central kernel policies up to the decomposition of a complete operating-system specification. Our results show that by a consequent application of the aspect-aware approach, AOP becomes a promising technology to reach configurability, separation of concerns, and runtime/memory efficiency on all levels of operating-system development.