Some Topics to Work on...

Are you interested in working on a thesis about operating systems, real-time, virtualization, or related issues? Here you can find a list of possible topics for a thesis; contact me if you are interested and want more information:

• Analysis of the real-time performance of different hypervisors
• Experimental comparison of the performance of different inter-VM communication mechanisms (based on vhost-user)
• Development of a small Linux-based OS (userspace, based on busybox) for embedded devices or small VMs. Something similar to BuildCore, but based on Makefiles and more configurable
• A new migration strategy for multi-processor EDF, based on "dynamic partitioning": theoretical analysis (a migration algorithm already exists, but its theoretical properties have not been formally proved yet) and/or implementation (the algorithm has been implemented only in a simulator; an implementation in the Linux kernel is still missing)
• Global real-time schedulers in multi-vCPU VMs: theoretical analysis and/or implementation
• Use a kernel tracing mechanism (for example, ftrace with libtracefs / libtraceevent) to detect periodic tasks. The theory for the analysis / detection (based on fourier transforms) has already beeen developed and implemented
• Re-implement an existing C++ simulator using the rust language. The application heavily relies on class inheritance, so porting it to idiomatic rust might be "interesting". A comparison between the performance of the original C++ application and the performance of the rust port can also be interesting.
• Use the rust language to implement some simple system component (an OS kernel, a hypervisor, the user-space part of a VMM, a device driver, a networking stack, ...) and compare performance and safety with a similar C implementation
• Developing real-time applications with a functional programming paradigm
• Use the hardware virtualization support provided by modern CPUs (in particular, extended/nested page tables) to implement cache coloring in the Linux kernel

All the descriptions are missing a lot of low-level details, do not be scared! If you contact me, I'll provide a better and more complete description.