Interrupt synchronization in the CiAO operating system

Abstract

Configurability is a major issue in the domain of embedded system software. Existing systems specifically lack good techniques to implement configurability of architectural OS concerns, such as the choice of isolation or synchronization policies to use. As such policies have a very cross-cutting character, aspects should provide good means to implement them in a configurable way. While our results show that this is in fact the case, 1) things could have been easier if additional language features were available, and, 2) additional means to influence the back-end code generation turned out to be very important. This paper presents our experiences in using AspectC++ to design and implement interrupt synchronization as a configurable property in the CiAO operating system.

The Aspect-Aware Design and Implementation of the CiAO Operating-System Family

“…5) demonstrates the design (and partly also the implementation) of a configurable architectural policy -from nonfunctional requirements down to aspect-aware design. (An early draft of this study has also been presented in [32].) 3.…”

Sleepy Sloth: Threads as Interrupts as Threads

“…In their work on the Solaris kernel for desktops and servers, they investigated ways to enhance interrupt service routines to become threads under the control of the OS kernel-in order for them to be able to block. Lohmann et al [14] showed that this concept is also feasible for embedded system kernels and made this kind of interrupt synchronization a configurable property of their CiAO system. Before those two systems, early microkernels and microkernellike systems (including AX [22], L3 [9], and L4 [10]) started implementing interrupt handlers as user threads, having very small stubs send the corresponding threads an IPC message once an interrupt is triggered; this way, regular threads and ISR threads also run in a single priority space.…”

Engineering Reliable Service Oriented Architecture

“…In particular, the implementation language and aspect weaver AspectC++ (Spinczyk and Lohmann, 2007) is used, which is a superset of the C++ programming language. With this programming paradigm, we showed that is possible to have maintainable, concern-separated system software code that has configurable architectural properties in its domain implementation (Lohmann et al, 2007b, Lohmann et al, 2007a.…”