You are, of course, free to come up with other essay topics. However, all topics must be approved by the course lecturer. I would recommend that you browse through the textbook, the lecture notes, current newspapers and magazines, and on-line journals, to find ideas for your essay, and also to find the source material for your essay. Remember to also look at my on-line web references page for some useful links to operating system information. If I add new topics below, I'll flag them as NEW .
Processes Take an existing OS, and describe how processes are implemented on it.
What process system calls exist, what process states exist etc. A new concept in processes is called threads . Take an existing OS and describe how it implements threads. Details on the performance of the thread system. Compare two thread environments, why a difference in design, advantages and disadvantages of each, performance of both.