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?

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.

I had to implement system calls in xv6.

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

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.

Try asking your favorite llm. They will even guide you with a small curriculum.

Advice like this, and then people wonder why they’re lonely.

I don't know… people were lonely before LLMs. And, they're right, this is a question one could easily paste into a frontier model and easily get back info that's way more useful than the significant majority of blog posts or replies would give! shrug But also I'd still like to hear what fooker has to say!

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