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 hin- der 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 poli- cies and its runtime support can be integrated with a framework for Aspect-Oriented Programming, Event- based AOP. Finally, we discuss the generalization of AOP-based techniques to other OS kernel modules.