I’m currently part of the Embedded Xinu Lab headed by Dr. Dennis Brylow at Marquette University, where I work on porting the lightweight embedded operating system to the RISC-V architecture.
This operating system is designed to be digestible by students, while covering many essential functions (process control, scheduling, paging, memory protection, etc). This presents a unique limitation as features must be fully fledged while maintaining a minimal footprint.
Embedded Xinu has found a home on many architectures and hardware over the years, most recently landing in the RISC-V system-on-a-chip realm. This iteration is under active development and presents many interesting problems, mainly in adapting and integrating modern hardware features to a legacy codebase.
While the main focus of the lab is on educational outcomes for our operating systems course, the bulk of our research is in the technical details of implementing a “simple” but capable operating system. This includes projects such as: porting to more modern hardware, designing complete but understandable subsystems, and building robust infrastructure for student deployment and evaluation.