411 REFERENCE · Wikibooks
Evolution of Operating Systems Designs/State of current research
Reference material by Wikibooks contributors. This retains its source identity and is not 411 news reporting.
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.