Report for CS 3100
You will be required to write a report on some operating system-related
topic. This report will be worth 20% of your final grade. The report should be
4-8 pages in length. The following is a list of ideas.
- A comprehensive review of one particular operating system - By
"comprehensive" I mean you should cover all of the subsystems that we will review in
class. One other thing: If you choose this one, please research and
operating system that you are not already familiar with. This is
for the purpose of education and discovery.
- An exhaustive review of just one subsystem, wherein you compare
different approaches to the same problem. Example: Compare numerous
different file system implementations (i.e. FAT, NTFS, HFS, BFS, CODA,
XFS, etc.), pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each, and where
they would be most appropriately used.
- The history, growth and evolution of a single operating system, or
family of operating systems. Good examples here would be various flavors
of DOS (CPM DOS, DR-DOS, MS-DOS, IBM-DOS, FreeDOS), or the various *BSDs
(FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BSDi). Pay attention to how they influenced
each other and what was learned along the way.
- Historical trends: mainframes -> departmental servers ->
workstations & PCs -> handhelds -> embedded systems. If you
choose this topic, I don't expect you to write in detail about the
operating system at each level, but rather to write from a higher-level
point of view about the various problems encountered with the various
kinds of machines, and how the OSs written for those machines address
those problems.
The above list is by no means exhaustive. I encourage you to come up with
your own ideas, but if you come up with a topic that is not on the above list,
please clear it with me first.