Advanced OS Final project guidelines

The final lab assignment for the class is to undertake a mini research project of your choice in a group of 1-3 people. You may wish to implement one or more of the features suggested as challenge problems in the lab assignments. You can also implement any of the ideas from papers we read in class, or anything else you think might be interesting. At the end of the semester, you will turn in a paper describing and evaluating your project, and present your work to the class.

Your project should be guided by the following deadlines:

• By Friday, November 11 you should form a project team of 1-3 people (preferably 2) and email the course staff to let us know with whom you will be working.
• Before Tuesday, November 15 you should schedule a meeting of your team with me (David Mazières) to discuss your proposed project. Once I have approved your proposal, send the course staff a short (1 paragraph) description of what you want to do, which we will post on the web site so everybody knows what the different projects are.

  Please schedule your meeting sooner rather than later, in case your team needs to iterate on the proposal. Note, in particular, that it's fine to meet with me if you don't have a concrete plan yet, as I can suggest some things for you to look into.

  Note: If you want to combine your project with your research or with work for another class, this is in general fine, but please let me know at the time of the proposal.

• By December 15 you must email the course staff a paper describing and evaluating your project. The paper should be no more than 10 pages in at least 11-point font. We will post your papers on the class web site.
• At 12:15pm Friday, December 16, you will present your project to the class and demo what you have done. Your combined talk and demo should take no more than 20 minutes. You must also submit the source code to your project at this time. Note that this is a hard deadline, since we have to reserve a room for the presentations and I have to submit grades for people.

Here are some ideas you might be interested in for projects. This list is by no means exhaustive.

• Implement BVT or another interesting scheduling algorithm on JOS.
• Modify bochs to add support for a hardware feature you think would benefit operating systems, and then change JOS to take advantage of this. As an example, you can look at Mondrix which adds fine-grained memory protection. (Perhaps you could just enhance JOS to take advantage of the Mondrian memory protection used by Mondrix.)
• Implement a real file system for JOS.
• Implement a single-level store like KeyKOS or L4, so that you can power-cycle your machine and then resume executing processes.
• Implement a highly-optimized threads package for JOS.
• Implement a novel protection model for JOS. (E.g., hierarchical user IDs, so any user can create "sub-users", or military-style mandatory access control.)
• Implement a network stack, and some "interesting" functionality--e.g., you could build a simple read-only network file system client, or IP forwarding/firewalling, or maybe build a distributed version of JOS (like V).
• Implement a multi-processor version of JOS.
• Run JOS on real hardware, and do a thorough evaluation of some performance aspect. In particular, newer x86 chips have many features designed to improve OS performance, but how effective are they? You might also take advantage of some of the fancy performance monitoring facilities built into modern CPUs.
• Implement support for debugging (or maybe profiling) in JOS.
• Design and implement a facility for downloading code into the kernel. (Perhaps you could embed an existing interpreted language implementation into the kernel.)
• Implement and evaluate a facility for batching system calls in JOS, to reduce the number of user-kernel crossings.
• Implement the fastest IPC system you can for a modern CPU. Can you "abuse" hyperthreading to make IPC go faster?
• Implement support for superpages, to reduce the number of TLB faults in applications that use more than 2MB of contiguous virtual memory. (See this paper for some ideas.)
• Implement support for binary emulation of another operating system (or a subset of another operating system), so that, for example, you can run statically-linked Linux binaries on JOS (provided they don't use esoteric system calls).