>}-I'm also looking for feedback on the degree of difficulty of this project,
>}-and relevant references.  I've not done very much kernel hacking.
>}-I've got a spare machine, spare drive space, Leffler et. al. Design & Impl,
>}-and the (perhaps not relevant) i386 data book.  Opinions?
>I once heard of something similar on a Macintosh, but it's not confirmed.

It's called "RAM Doubler", and is reported to work extremely well, assuming
you have the right revision number :-).

What would be really interesting would be to compare the access habits of
programs on different OS architectures to contrast the effectiveness of
VM compression.  Of course, that sounds like more than a 3-credit project ;-).