Programming OS Schedulers with Domain-Specific Languages and Aspects: New Approaches for OS Kernel Engineering∗

There is a continuous demand for new scheduling policies to address specific requirements of modern OSes. However, the implementation of such policies within an existing OS kernel raises many problems, mainly because optimizations within schedulers hinder code maintenance and implementation of existing schedulers is spread over the kernel. In this paper we motivate that schedulers form an aspect within OS kernels. We show how the DSL of the Bossa system for the definition of scheduling policies and its runtime support can be integrated with a framework for Aspect-Oriented Programming, Eventbased AOP. Finally, we discuss the generalization of AOP-based techniques to other OS kernel modules.