After a few weeks of research, my teacher and i discovered very few slack space tools. The one worth mentioning is bmap. It basically opens up the partition (i.e. /dev/hda2), lseek to the logical block number of a file passed in from the commandline, and read/writes to the slack space of that block. All from user space. This is the basis of my approach for my graduate project except I want to do it within the kernel. More or less this is the technique my teacher suggested. I have or still having some minor problems implementing this type of functionality within the kernel. Manipulating structures within the memory manager is like doing playing the game operation with a pair of vice-grips. Or at least this is how I feel.