A dynamic aspect-oriented system for OS kernels

  • Authors:

  • Yoshisato Yanagisawa;Kenichi Kourai;Shigeru Chiba

  • Affiliations:

  • Tokyo Institute of Technology;Tokyo Institute of Technology;Tokyo Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We propose a dynamic aspect-oriented system for operating system (OS) kernels written in the C language. Unlike other similar systems, our system named KLASY allows the users to pointcut not only function calls but also member accesses to structures. This feature helps the developers who want to use aspects for profiling or debugging an OS kernel. To enable this, KLASY uses a modified C compiler for compiling an OS kernel. The modified compiler produces extended symbol information, which enables a dynamic weaver to find the memory addresses of join point shadows during runtime. Since a normal C compiler produces only limited symbol information, other dynamic aspect-oriented systems for C have been able to pointcut only function calls. We have implemented KLASY for Linux with the GNU C compiler. Our experiments revealed that KLASY achieves sufficient execution performance for practical use. Our case studies disclosed that KLASY is useful for real applications.