Kernel Development Learning Pipeline

Midpoint Presentation Guidelines 🕴️

You will create a brief, pre-recorded presentation on research into a Linux kernel related topic of your choice

Presentation requirements

• 10 ± 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 🙂

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

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

  • 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 February 27 2025

• You will submit your presentation by posting a link to your recording in Matrix

  • Suggestion: use OBS to record your presentation as a livestream to youtube and set the video visibility to “unlisted” so only those with the link can access

  • You may use any video hosting platform of your choice, but make sure anyone with the link can acces your video before you submit

  • There is no peer review and additional final submission for this assignment

  • Submit the link to your video in the #midpoint channel on Matrix by midnight 20 March 2025

Example topics

• What is the OOM killer and what algorithm does it implement?

• What is the Linux VDSO? What problem does it try to solve? How does it compare to other historical techniques like vsyscall?

• How does the Linux BPF system let userspace run arbitrary code in kernel mode? What techniques does it use to ensure that this is safe?

• Why are there multiple versions of some syscalls with numbers at the end (e.g. accept, dup, pipe, etc)? What do the numbers refer to?

• Why do some syscalls have a version ending in at (e.g. open, fstat, rename, symlink, etc)? What issue were they added to address?

• What mechanisms can be used in the kernel to do performance profiling and how?

• What role does the rust programming language play in the kernel?

• How do concurrent data structures and Read-Copy-Update (RCU) mitigate race conditions in the Linux kernel without using locks?

• How does Facebook’s sched_ext BPF extension re-implement the scheduler?