Kernel Development Learning Pipeline

Midpoint Presentation Guidelines 🕴️

You will deliver a brief presentation on research into a kernel related topic of your choice

Presentation requirements

• 7 ± 1 minutes long

• Must include some sort of visual component

  • Slideshow

  • Diagrams

  • Etc.

• Must include some sort of live demo in the terminal, even if brief

• Must include discussion of some snippet(s) of code that is relevant to your topic

• Plenty of room to be creative 🙂

General Advice

• Go deep

  • It is much more interesting to pick a specific detail of some topic and really dig into it than offer a broad but shallow overview of a large scope

• Show don't tell

  • It is much more interesting to see e.g. the actual code, commit message, mailing list discussion, running behavior than a coarse summary or a bullet on a slide

What and how to submit

• You will propose your choice of topic ahead of time

  • You may chose a topic from the list below or come up with your own

  • The proposal must begin with a one sentence summary of the topic you wish to cover

  • The proposal must contain a rough outline of what you plan to discuss in the form of approximately a half dozen bullet points

  • We will reply to your message with the proposal to let you know if it is approved or what our concerns are if we cannot approve it

  • Submit your proposal in the #midpoint channel on Matrix by midnight October 14th 2025

  • Each student must choose a unique topic, so check the #midpoint channel to see if your choice is available

    • Note: it is potentially acceptable that two proposals start from the same example idea, as long as the details are substantially different

    • This goes hand in hand with the suggestion above to go deep, many students can pick different specific details to focus on.

• You will make your presentation live during class during a pre-assigned slot at the beginning of class on weeks 6, 7, 8

Example topics

• Compare and contrast open source operating systems:

  • Pick an operating system with an open source kernel and find out how it differs from the Linux kernel

  • Focus on a specific design decision and unpack the history and reasoning behind it.

  • Compare and show off the relevant code for the contrasting features in both kernels

  • Demo the relevant features live

  • Here are some examples of open source operating systems and notable features (this list is definitely not exhaustive, just a starting point):

  • Minix

    • Microkernel vs monolithic kernel

  • Darwin XNU / Mach

    • Ports as IPC primitive vs shared memory or pipes

  • GNU Hurd

    • Translators vs FUSE

    • Servers vs device drivers

  • FreeBSD

    • Jails vs namespaces

  • NetBSD

    • Rump kernel vs FUSE

  • OpenBSD

    • unveil/pledge vs seccomp / LSM

  • DragonFly BSD

    • Serializing tokens vs RCU

  • OpenSolaris

    • Solaris Zones for virtualization vs kvm or namespaces

    • Dtrace vs Ftrace

  • SerenityOS

    • Fully C++ kernel vs C kernel

    • Structured json data in /proc vs unstructured data

  • Fuchsia

    • Capability-based permissions vs ambient authority

  • plan9

    • 9p protocol and Process namespaces vs Standard File System Hierarchy

• Something else:

  • Rather than listing specific suggestions, I encourage you to come up with something that really interests you

  • Should be related to the kernel, with a particular emphasis on design decisions, their supporting rationale and the resulting code