Operating system support

The general idea

Many aspects of an operating system require hardware support, either for performance, or because enforcing a specific policy in software is not possible. For example, an operating system may have a range of privileged modes, which can only be enforced with hardware support.

Some of the hardware support is quite complex, and has to be implemented efficiently for good overall system performance. In this project, you need to choose a specific area – not not one that is too simple – and work through the reasons for having that hardware support and issues in making it efficient.

The challenge

You will not be able to explore these issues directly with simple tools that can be mastered in the time the course runs. You will therefore need to consider issues like:

converting an abstract textbook description of an aspect of the operating system to a sequence of operations
understanding which of those operations need hardware support
tracking down what that hardware support is in a particular processor
showing how the steps for representative operations are implemented in hardware
explain how the hardware support achieves the design goals (security, performance, or whatever applies to your example)

If you are doing or have done an operating systems course this may be a good project. If you haven’t, be prepared to learn a lot.