Hello, does anyone know any university that has lines of research on the linux kernel

Greg KH greg at kroah.com
Sun Sep 29 04:36:59 EDT 2019


On Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 04:16:46PM -0400, Valdis Klētnieks wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Sep 2019 12:45:11 -0600, Manuel Quintero Fonseca said:
> > Hello, does anyone know any university that has lines of research on
> > the linux kernel
> 
> Well.. most of the actual code development is being done out in industry
> and by individuals.  The stuff that happens in universities is usually more
> theoretical (new concepts in memory management, etc), and merely *uses*
> Linux as a platform because it's available.  Pretty much nobody is doing
> any research *on* the Linux kernel as itself (unless it's as a case study in
> managing large scale software development, or as a data point for code
> quality metrics and other such things).

That's not true, there are lots of universities doing research *on* the
Linux kernel, as well as doing research *for* the Linux kernel in order
to make it better and to prove/disprove new research theories.

One example would be the first talk listed here that happened last week:
	https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2019/live-blog-day-3-2/
It describes how research is being used to both prove that the kernel's
model of operation is correct (he found bugs in it when doing so) as
well as to advance the development of formal methods.

There are loads of other research projects doing stuff like this all
over the world, look at the output of computer science papers for lots
of examples of this.

> And there's a difference between "University ABC has a professor who's got this
> one project that happens to use Linux in it" and "University DEF has 4
> professors and 20 grad students who have set up an official Center For
> Something Research".  So if you're looking for grad schools, you want to be
> looking at things with longevity, like the MIT Media Lab, or Purdue's computer
> security expertise, or a lot of the stuff being done at CMU or Stanford or
> Berkeley.  It sucks to transfer to a grad school for 3 years, only to have the
> project you transferred for go away a year later....

There are lots of these types of "centers of research" at universities
outside of the US as well.  Again, look at papers for examples of common
groups of professors sponsoring projects for where this is happening.  I
don't want to slight any by only listing a few :)

thanks,

greg k-h



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