Aspect-Oriented Approach to Operating System Development Empirical Study

This paper presents a case-study where a new programming technique is applied to an established branch of software development. The purpose of the study was to test whether or not aspect-oriented programming (AOP) could be used in operating systems development. Instead of any real world operating system an educational OS with the name Nachos was used. This was because Nachos is written in Java which makes it easy to introduce aspect-oriented techniques. In this paper a new file system for the Nachos OS is developed and then it is analyzed by profiling and metrics. The results show that it is possible to use AOP in OS development and that it is also beneficial to do so.