End-of-term survey paper

Due by 11:59pm, Friday, May 4.

This assignment is required for CSC456 students only.

Assignment overview
You need to turn in a survey paper on an OS topic of your choosing. Your paper has to provide a brief historical perspective on this OS topic. It needs to give a fairly detailed coverage on the state-of-art research and engineering efforts in this area. What is not required (but would be very helpful for getting you a high grade) is some suggestion on possible future directions of improving the current status from the research or engineering perspective. You should provide accurate references to related work you mention in the survey. There is no specific requirement on the length of the survey, but I am expecting something with at least 2000 words. Below I provide some suggested topics of this survey paper, along with a few starting points. These starting points are far from being complete. Note that you are free (and encouraged) to choose something outside these topics.

Systems reliability and debugging

Distributed file systems

Micro-kernel operating systems Virtual machines Operating systems for sensors and small mobile devices OS support for highly concurrent online servers Instructional operating systems