Aspect-oriented system structure

Operating system structure is important; it leads to understandable, maintainable, 'pluggable' code. But despite our best efforts, some system elements have been difficult to structure. We propose a new analysis of this problem, and a new technology that can structure these elements. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) (G. Kiczales et al., 1997) uses linguistic mechanisms to support the separation of crosscutting elements, or aspects of the system, from primary functionality. We have developed a proof-of-concept AOP implementation of prefetching in FreeBSD (www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/spl/aspects/aspectc.html). In our implementation, we have been able to modularize prefetching.