One of my OS courses involved loading BSD3.0 on a machine. The instructor gave us an overview of the internal structures and by the end of the course we had to make a significant modification to the kernel. The modification didn't necessarily need to extend the product in a meaningful way, it just had to interact with the kernel in a manner that demonstrated we had an understanding of the kernel. I.E. My project was to create a new FS that would encrypt/decrypt the data being written/read to this filesystem. Modifications were made to the utils such as mount to recognize the new FS and ask for passwords. The encryption algorithm was just XORing 1 to the data but the point of the exercise was not to design strong encryption but to show knowledge of the kernel internals. With Linux it would be easy to instruct the students on the structure of the kernel and how to extend it with modules. Have them write simple programs to drive printers through the serial port. Get them debugging kernel code. Once you are elbow deep in, new and more complex projects will present themselves such as different scheduling algorithms. Don't underestimate what the students might be capable of.
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One of my OS courses involved loading BSD3.0 on a machine. The instructor gave us an overview of the internal structures and by the end of the course we had to make a significant modification to the kernel. The modification didn't necessarily need to extend the product in a meaningful way, it just had to interact with the kernel in a manner that demonstrated we had an understanding of the kernel. I.E. My project was to create a new FS that would encrypt/decrypt the data being written/read to this filesystem. Modifications were made to the utils such as mount to recognize the new FS and ask for passwords. The encryption algorithm was just XORing 1 to the data but the point of the exercise was not to design strong encryption but to show knowledge of the kernel internals. With Linux it would be easy to instruct the students on the structure of the kernel and how to extend it with modules. Have them write simple programs to drive printers through the serial port. Get them debugging kernel code. Once you are elbow deep in, new and more complex projects will present themselves such as different scheduling algorithms. Don't underestimate what the students might be capable of.