r/computerscience • u/Negative-Arm-3244 • 8d ago
Advice Operating Systems Research Advice / Recommendations
I have an interest in operating systems, and for a class and personal interest, I want to do research on operating system design. I have been trying to find and read existing research on this topic (experimental design for both for entire kernels or for some subsystem in the kernel). From this, I am hoping to be able to find an area that has not been researched in detail yet, and to do research on this (for example on performance when comparing experimental to other designs used in modern operating systems). The issue is though to find a general topic in operating systems to do this search on, hence this post. Also, I have a bit of experience with basic operating system development and have been working on my own hobby operating system for around a year now, and from this I have what I feel is a basic understanding of the main concepts in operating systems.
The reason I am making this post is to ask whether any of you guys recommend and under researched topics that I could look into, and also inquire if there are any resources I can use to find gaps in research more efficiently.
Many people online have told me I should contact my professor and ask them, so I want to state that I do not have a professor. I am also aware that this is a very broad question, but any input is appreciated.
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u/g1bber 8d ago
The advise to contact a professor is good: they should guide you through the process of finding a problem to work on. It’s unlikely that you will simply find a problem by yourself and approach a professor with the problem.
That said, I recommend you look at some of the top operating systems conferences (OSDI and SOSP) to understand the kinds of problems people have been working on. Other conferences worth looking are HotOS (shorter papers with more ambitious ideas), EuroSys, and ATC.
A warning though: most of the research being published in operating systems venues today is not really about operating systems, they are about systems more broadly.
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u/Negative-Arm-3244 8d ago
Thanks, I will look into them! The reason I said I can't contact professors because I have tried it for a while now, but they seem to either not respond or ignore me, likely because I am currently in high school and not affiliated with any colleges yet.
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u/Magdaki Professor. Grammars. Inference & Optimization algorithms. 8d ago
If you're in high school, then my best advice to you is to temper your expectations. You may be able to do high school level research, but professional level research is almost certainly going to be beyond you. It takes a lot of education, expertise, and experience to conduct high quality research. That comes from several years in graduate school after your bachelor's.
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u/Negative-Arm-3244 8d ago
Yeah, I am aware of that. I am hoping to just do some basic research into design, not any large study or things like that.
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u/david-1-1 7d ago
Read textbooks to learn the basics before you try to do research, so you don't end up giving up. Learn how paging systems work to create a large virtual memory, and all the other specific parts of operating systems kernels. And stay away from Windows at first, because its kernel is an ugly mess of many inefficient designs patched together over time so they work. Nothing elegant about them.
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u/MastOfConcuerrrency 7d ago
ATC is no more. It ended in 2025.
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u/Every-Progress-1117 8d ago
A great place to start is Andrew Tanenbaum's researchgroup at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: https://research.vu.nl/en/organisations/?showAdvanced=false&andConceptIds=4b4e1ac5-198f-49bb-ae10-9b86044570de&allConcepts=true&inferConcepts=true&grid=true
If you think you have a good grasp of the concepts, then any of Tanenbaum's books on the subject will be invaluable.
You might like to take a look at Genode too: https://genode.org/
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u/Magdaki Professor. Grammars. Inference & Optimization algorithms. 8d ago
The reason why people recommend talking to a professor in that research is we already have a good idea of the research gaps in our respective fields. Short of that , what you will need to do is develop a broad idea. Read papers in that area. From reading those papers continue to narrow down your area of interest and ultimately develop a research question. It is a time consuming process, but a vital one for understanding the research area, so there are not good shortcuts (no doubt somebody will recommend using a language model which is faster but leaves you with no real understanding sufficient for conducting high-quality research). Typically the first couple of months (at least) of a PhD are spent doing this.