Aspect-Oriented Design and Implementation of an AUTOSAR-Like Operating System Kernel

In the automotive industry, the consolidation of the software features on less but more powerful microcontrollers has led to the advent of a more sophisticated type of embedded operating system, which is targeted by the AUTOSAR OS standard. Since this specification prescribes the newly introduced protection features to be configurable (though on a coarse level), an implementation is to be designed as a product family. CiAO aims to face that challenge by making use of concepts of aspectoriented programming (AOP). After identifying the concerns present in an AUTOSAR-like operating system kernel, these concerns are modeled in an aspect-oriented kernel design. Thereby, even highly cross-cutting concerns like kernel synchronization or fault isolation features can be kept encapsulated, configurable, and evolvable. An evaluation of the approach shows that the CiAO kernel is highly scalable with respect to both memory footprint and performance; a comparison to a commercial implementation of the standard indicates that the aspect-oriented implementation does not induce a significant overhead per se. Additionally, the systems programmer benefits from several advantages that the aspect-oriented design bears: Many requirements stated in the AUTOSAR standard can be formulated in a natural and encapsulated way, facilitating the understanding and maintenance of the kernel design and implementation.