Using aspectC to improve the modularity of path-specific customization in operating system code

Layered architecture in operating system code is often compromised by execution path-specific customizations such as prefetching, page replacement and scheduling strategies. Path-specific customizations are difficult to modularize in a layered architecture because they involve dynamic context passing and layer violations. Effectively they are vertically integrated slices through the layers. An initial experiment using an aspect-oriented programming language to refactor prefetching in the FreeBSD operating system kernal shows significant benefits, including easy (un)pluggability of prefetching modes, independent development of prefetching modes, and overall improved comprehensibility.

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