236376 OSE Lab 7: Final Project

Due date:

See Webcourse.

Please note: You should not publish your lab solutions in any publicly accessible site such as github.

For the last part of the course you'll work on an operating systems project of your choice. The goal is to have fun and explore more advanced O/S topics; you don't have to do novel research.

For the final project you have two options:

• Write network device driver for JOS -- do lab 6. You are free, of course, to extend lab 6, or any part of JOS, further in interesting ways.
• Work on a project of your choice that involves your JOS. This project must be of the same scope as lab 6 or larger.

We'll grade you on how much you got working, how elegant your design is, how well you can explain it, and how interesting and creative your solution is. We do realize that time is limited, so we don't expect you to re-write Linux by the end of the semester. Try to make sure your goals are reasonable; perhaps set a minimum goal that's definitely achievable and a more ambitious goal if things go well.

Deliverables

• Send your proposal to TA in charge, which should include:
  • The names and IDs of your group members.
  • What did you choose to do (no more than a paragraph or two).
  • What do you plan to present (list of deliverables).
• Submit source code tar-ball along with a short write-up to the webcourse site. Put the write-up under the top-level source directory with the name "README.pdf" or "README.txt".
• Project demonstration.
• Be ready to demo the challenges during the project presentation. Backup video is encouraged to combat technical issues during the presentation.

Ideas

• Build a virtual machine monitor that can run multiple guests (for example, multiple instances of JOS), using x86 VM support.
• Do something useful with the x86 Trusted Execution Technology. For example, run applications without having to trust the kernel. Here is a recent paper on this topic.
• Fix xv6 logging to support concurrent transactions, and generally have higher performance, perhaps taking ideas from Linux EXT3.
• Use file system ideas from Soft updates, WAFL, NILFS, ZFS, or another advanced file system.
• Add snapshots to a file system, so that a user can look at the file system as it appeared at various points in the past. You'll probably want to use some kind of copy-on-write for disk storage to keep space consumption down.
• Implement capabilities to provide fine-grained control over what privileges processes have.
• Build a distributed shared memory (DSM) system, so that you can run multi-threaded shared memory parallel programs on a cluster of machines, using paging to give the appearance of real shared memory. When a thread tries to access a page that's on another machine, the page fault will give the DSM system a chance to fetch the page over the network from whatever machine currently stores.
• Layer software RAID-5 over an array of disks, to increase fault tolerance and performance.
• Allow processes to migrate from one machine to another over the network. You'll need to do something about the various pieces of a process's state, such as file descriptors.
• Implement paging to disk in JOS, so that processes can be bigger than RAM. Extend your pager with swapping.
• Implement loadable kernel modules to extend the JOS kernel to replace or extend subsystems of the JOS kernel. For example, make the file system a kernel module so that you can add a kernel module to read DOS file systems, or replace the JOS file system.
• Use xfi to sandbox code within a process.
• Implement ideas from the Exokernel papers, (accessible from within the Technion) for example the packet filter.
• Find more inspiration in Arrakis, OS that impements Exokenel ideas on modern hardware.
• Make JOS have soft real-time behavior. You will have to identify some application for which this is useful.
• Make JOS run on 64-bit CPUs. This includes redoing the virtual memory system to use 4-level pages tables. See reference page for some documentation.
• Port (small part of) JOS to an ARM microprocessor. The osdev wiki may be helpful.
• A window system for JOS, including graphics driver and mouse. See reference page for some documentation. sqrt(x) is an example JOS window system (and writeup).
• Implement dune to export privileged hardware instructions to user-space applications in JOS.
• Intel recently announced transactional memory support for its upcoming processors. Implement support for Intel's TSX in the QEMU emulator. A follow-on project would be to explore the use of Intel TSX primitives in writing concurrent software, such as extending the JOS kernel to use transactional memory.
• Write a user-level debugger; add strace-like functionality; hardware register profiling (e.g. Oprofile); call-traces