Evolution of Operating Systems Designs/State of current research

Operating systems research has slowed for two reasons. First, we now must concern ourselves with compatibility. Second, the excitement and low hanging fruit of the early years is behind us. Many pioneers who participated in that early excitement have declared that OS research is now dead, but it does carry on to this day. Many old research topics still have room for improvement. Modern research includes:

• page replacement
• copy restriction technology (DRM)
• filesystems
• power-aware computing for increased battery life and reduced fan noise
• network packet congestion control and queueing algorithms
• superpages

Further reading

• Operating System Design has some low-level details about modern OS research.