Design And Implementation Of The Core Of The Operating System Using Object-oriented Method

Operating system software should be flexible and efficient. Furthermore, an operating system should survive a lifetime of change without sacrificing either of these properties. These changes include both advances in hardware technology and changing demands from users. Keeping pace with advances in hardware technology makes portability necessary, for example, transplanting an existing operating system from single processor to multiple processors. Also, an operating system should be extensible enough to meet the changing requirements from users. In the past these demands included the support for graphical user interfaces and distributed systems.Not only are requirements of portability and extensibility important, but also their interaction can acquire important tradeoffs. For example, extensions may impair performance if existing mechanisms are alerted to coexist with new mechanisms.Object-oriented paradigm has become one useful tool to solve this kind of problems. Object-oriented programming can support the sharing of common interface and code, incremental extensibility and the development of reusable and extensible software by allowing functions to take different objects as arguments.Nowadays, we witnessed various object-oriented technologies in many modern operating systems, for example, the dynamic linking during the runtime of a process. The modules of a process are not linked before it runs, and it can choose which modules to link when it is running. This technique matches the reconstruction in object-oriented paradigm. And although UNIX and Linux are implemented with C language, they also adopted many object-oriented techniques, especially in the file system and network systems.In this paper, we first discussed the problems encountered by modern operating system designers and the advantages of using object-oriented techniques to design and implement operating systems. Then we presented in detail the process of designing an object-oriented operating system. The process management was implemented and the performance of context switching was tested. The system performance, portability and the extensibility were evaluated. It was proved that without obvious sacrifice of system performance, objected-oriented technologies are able to significantly increase the portability, extensibility and maintenance of the operating systems.