Linux Tools Project/Student Projects

Linux Tools Project :: Student Project Ideas

The Linux Tools Project works on a lot of areas that are of interest to academia. Things like memory usage visualization, process timing, thread visualization, call graphs, etc. It would be mutually beneficial if students could work on implementations of tools like these as part of their studies. Final year project courses could produce code that is not only a great learning experience for the author and suitable for academic credit, but also of use to professors. The benefits of an IDE -- Eclipse, in this case -- can be exploited to allow students to visualize, compare, measure, etc.; the students can focus on the particular problem under study and not the mechanical, often mundane, aspects of project setup, building, compilation, etc.

4 month project ideas

• thread lifetime visualization (*)
• deadlock detection
• memory allocation analysis
• memory model visualization
• I/O usage
• algorithm analysis
• data structure visualization
• automatic printf-like debugging (perhaps with SystemTap or gdb tracepoints?)
  • double-clicks in the gutter would register trace points that do simple function/line # outputs stdout

8 month project ideas

• static property checking
• execution comparison
  • compare differences between two versions of a program
  • perhaps at level lower than source code
  • requires debuginfo
• compiler operation (basic block visualization, etc.)
• your ideas here