[eschaton]

What, pray tell, would you do for a first assignment in an Operating Systems class at a top-tier school that actually involves making changes to on realistic operating system code?

[surajrmal]

This is the set of assignments they do at the university of Illinois (a top 10 computer engineering school): https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/ece391/fa2025/assignme...

It looks roughly the same as when I took 15 years ago, except they switched to riscv from x86. Honestly, what you're describing sounds too difficult for a first assignment. Implementing irq handlers or syscalls on an existing codebase is far more realistic, plausible, and useful.

[fooker]

I had to implement system calls in xv6.

You can look up which top tier schools use it for OS classes.

[glhaynes]

At the risk of getting further off-topic: what sort of system calls did they have you implement? I’ve never done but a tiny bit of kernel hacking and that sounds like a good exercise, but I’m not sure what would be a good first syscall to add.

[eschaton]

Oh, is that what MIT’s using these days?