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General:

  - Suggest where to start in each assignment?

  - Provide more tests!

Threads project:				

  - Many students thought this was by far the hardest.  What can we do
    to make it a little easier?
    
    Move `join' part to project 2?

  - Students don't understand that they'll need to read lots of code
    before they can start writing.

  - Students think data structures are more important than they really
    are.  Say that clever data structures won't get you too much extra
    credit compared to simpler ones.  Really bad or "stupid" data
    structures might cost points though.

  - Some students would appreciate more discussion of nitty-gritty
    details:

      Finally, by doing pintos, an x86 OS, I was hoping to gain some
      knowledge about how an X86 OS really works. Instead we ended up
      banging on a black box with magical ASM that would pop up in gdb
      when we had memory corruption. While one could make the argument
      that this is too much application over theory, I feel like the
      theory of OS/140 is application oriented enough that going over
      what an x86 OS really does would not be harmful or
      unacademic. What's in those first few bytes to bootstrap the OS?
      How does it find a kernel that is scattered across a filesystem
      that the bootloader/computer knows nothing about. How does I/O
      initiailization works? What is that magic about transforming a
      thread into a process? I have absolutely no idea.

      This feeling of not having a better grasp of OS/low-level
      programming is something I can't shake, but that I'm not sure how
      one would be rectified. How on earth did pintos get written in ~2
      months? I'm again at a loss.

  - printf()s can fail in weird circumstances.  Should we try adding
    code for using the special output port, which doesn't need any
    synchronization etc.?

Userprog project:

  - Students thought project 2 was especially easy.  Reduce amount of
    time to allow more time for another project?  Add something to do
    with the page table?  Move `join' functionality here from project
    1?

VM project:

  - One student suggestion:

      Second point of confusion: the difference between kernel address
      space and actual physical addresses (kernel address minus
      PHYS_BASE).  It seemed weird that the functions to access
      pagedir entries used kernel virtual addresses instead of
      physical addresses.  We eventually realized that when the
      assignment refers to the virtual-to-physical translations that
      we're supposed to do, 'physical' actually means 'kernel virtual'
      (or a location on disk).  A sentence or two clearing up this
      ambiguity would have been helpful.

Filesys project:

  - A fair number of students thought this was the hardest project.
    Perhaps we could add some notes about where to start?