Operating System…

1. What are the basic functions of an operating system? - Operating system controls and
coordinates the use of the hardware among the various applications programs for various
uses. Operating system acts as resource allocator and manager. Since there are many
possibly conflicting requests for resources the operating system must decide which requests
are allocated resources to operating the computer system efficiently and fairly. Also operating
system is control program which controls the user programs to prevent errors and improper
use of the computer. It is especially concerned with the operation and control of I/O devices.
2. Why paging is used? - Paging is solution to external fragmentation problem which is to
permit the logical address space of a process to be noncontiguous, thus allowing a process to
be allocating physical memory wherever the latter is available.
3. While running DOS on a PC, which command would be used to duplicate the entire
diskette? diskcopy
4. What resources are used when a thread created? How do they differ from those
when a process is created?- When a thread is created the threads does not require any
new resources to execute the thread shares the resources like memory of the process to which
they belong to. The benefit of code sharing is that it allows an application to have several
different threads of activity all within the same address space. Whereas if a new process
creation is very heavyweight because it always requires new address space to be created and
even if they share the memory then the inter process communication is expensive when
compared to the communication between the threads.
5. What is virtual memory? - Virtual memory is hardware technique where the system appears
to have more memory that it actually does. This is done by time-sharing, the physical memory
and storage parts of the memory one disk when they are not actively being used.
6. What is Throughput, Turnaround time, waiting time and Response time? - Throughput
– number of processes that complete their execution per time unit. Turnaround time – amount
of time to execute a particular process. Waiting time – amount of time a process has been
waiting in the ready queue. Response time – amount of time it takes from when a request was
submitted until the first response is produced, not output (for time-sharing environment).
7. What is the state of the processor, when a process is waiting for some event to
occur? - Waiting state
8. What is the important aspect of a real-time system or Mission Critical Systems? - A
real time operating system has well defined fixed time constraints. Process must be done
within the defined constraints or the system will fail. An example is the operating system for a
flight control computer or an advanced jet airplane. Often used as a control device in a
dedicated application such as controlling scientific experiments, medical imaging systems,
industrial control systems, and some display systems. Real-Time systems may be either hard
or soft real-time. Hard real-time : Secondary storage limited or absent, data stored in short
term memory, or read-only memory (ROM), Conflicts with time-sharing systems, not
supported by general-purpose operating systems. Soft real-time : Limited utility in industrial
control of robotics, Useful in applications (multimedia, virtual reality) requiring advanced
operating-system features.
9. What is the difference between Hard and Soft real-time systems? - A hard real-time
system guarantees that critical tasks complete on time. This goal requires that all delays in
the system be bounded from the retrieval of the stored data to the time that it takes the
operating system to finish any request made of it. A soft real time system where a critical
real-time task gets priority over other tasks and retains that priority until it completes. As in
hard real time systems kernel delays need to be bounded
10. What is the cause of thrashing? How does the system detect thrashing? Once it
detects thrashing, what can the system do to eliminate this problem? - Thrashing is
caused by under allocation of the minimum number of pages required by a process, forcing it
to continuously page fault. The system can detect thrashing by evaluating the level of CPU
utilization as compared to the level of multiprogramming. It can be eliminated by reducing the
level of multiprogramming.
11. What is multi tasking, multi programming, multi threading? - Multi programming :
Multiprogramming is the technique of running several programs at a time using timesharing. It
allows a computer to do several things at the same time. Multiprogramming creates logical
parallelism. The concept of multiprogramming is that the operating system keeps several jobs
in memory simultaneously. The operating system selects a job from the job pool and starts
executing a job, when that job needs to wait for any i/o operations the CPU is switched to
another job. So the main idea here is that the CPU is never idle. Multi tasking : Multitasking
is the logical extension of multiprogramming .The concept of multitasking is quite similar to
multiprogramming but difference is that the switching between jobs occurs so frequently that
the users can interact with each program while it is running. This concept is also known as
time-sharing systems. A time-shared operating system uses CPU scheduling and
multiprogramming to provide each user with a small portion of time-shared system. Multi
threading : An application typically is implemented as a separate process with several
threads of control. In some situations a single application may be required to perform several
similar tasks for example a web server accepts client requests for web pages, images, sound,
and so forth. A busy web server may have several of clients concurrently accessing it. If the
web server ran as a traditional single-threaded process, it would be able to service only one
client at a time. The amount of time that a client might have to wait for its request to be
serviced could be enormous. So it is efficient to have one process that contains multiple
threads to serve the same purpose. This approach would multithread the web-server process,
the server would create a separate thread that would listen for client requests when a request
was made rather than creating another process it would create another thread to service the
request. To get the advantages like responsiveness, Resource sharing economy and utilization
of multiprocessor architectures multithreading concept can be used.
12. What is hard disk and what is its purpose? - Hard disk is the secondary storage device,
which holds the data in bulk, and it holds the data on the magnetic medium of the disk.Hard
disks have a hard platter that holds the magnetic medium, the magnetic medium can be easily
erased and rewritten, and a typical desktop machine will have a hard disk with a capacity of
between 10 and 40 gigabytes. Data is stored onto the disk in the form of files.
13. What is fragmentation? Different types of fragmentation? - Fragmentation occurs in a
dynamic memory allocation system when many of the free blocks are too small to satisfy any
request. External Fragmentation : External Fragmentation happens when a dynamic
memory allocation algorithm allocates some memory and a small piece is left over that cannot
be effectively used. If too much external fragmentation occurs, the amount of usable memory
is drastically reduced. Total memory space exists to satisfy a request, but it is not
contiguous.Internal Fragmentation : Internal fragmentation is the space wasted inside of
allocated memory blocks because of restriction on the allowed sizes of allocated blocks.
Allocated memory may be slightly larger than requested memory; this size difference is
memory internal to a partition, but not being used
14. What is DRAM? In which form does it store data? - DRAM is not the best, but it's cheap,
does the job, and is available almost everywhere you look. DRAM data resides in a cell made
of a capacitor and a transistor. The capacitor tends to lose data unless it's recharged every
couple of milliseconds, and this recharging tends to slow down the performance of DRAM
compared to speedier RAM types.
 15. What is Dispatcher? - Dispatcher module gives control of the CPU to the process selected by
the short-term scheduler; this involves: Switching context, Switching to user mode, Jumping
to the proper location in the user program to restart that program, dispatch latency – time it
takes for the dispatcher to stop one process and start another running.
16. What is CPU Scheduler? - Selects from among the processes in memory that are ready to
execute, and allocates the CPU to one of them. CPU scheduling decisions may take place when
a process: 1.Switches from running to waiting state. 2.Switches from running to ready state.
3.Switches from waiting to ready. 4.Terminates. Scheduling under 1 and 4 is non-preemptive.
All other scheduling is preemptive.
17. What is Context Switch? - Switching the CPU to another process requires saving the state
of the old process and loading the saved state for the new process. This task is known as a
context switch. Context-switch time is pure overhead, because the system does no useful
work while switching. Its speed varies from machine to machine, depending on the memory
speed, the number of registers which must be copied, the existed of special instructions(such
as a single instruction to load or store all registers).
18. What is cache memory? - Cache memory is random access memory (RAM) that a computer
microprocessor can access more quickly than it can access regular RAM. As the microprocessor
processes data, it looks first in the cache memory and if it finds the data there (from a
previous reading of data), it does not have to do the more time-consuming reading of data
from larger memory.
19. What is a Safe State and what is its use in deadlock avoidance? - When a process
requests an available resource, system must decide if immediate allocation leaves the system
in a safe state. System is in safe state if there exists a safe sequence of all processes.
Deadlock Avoidance: ensure that a system will never enter an unsafe state.
20. What is a Real-Time System? - A real time process is a process that must respond to the
events within a certain time period. A real time operating system is an operating system that
can run real time processes successfully
21. Why is paging used?

Paging is solution to external fragmentation problem which is to permit the logical

address space of a process to be noncontiguous, thus allowing a process to be
allocating physical memory wherever the latter is available.

1) State and explain about what an operating system is?

Operating system is made up of basically two functions they are managing resources and extending
the machine. Operating system gives a user interface through which he can perform various functions.
It acts as a medium for communication between the machine and user.

2) Explain about what a signal is?

A signal is a software mechanism that informs a process of the occurrence of asynchronous events. It
does not employ priorities but it is more or less similar to a hardware interrupt. That is, all signals are
treated equally. Signals that occur at the same time are presented to a process one at a time, with no
particular ordering.

3) What design and management issues are raised by the existence of concurrency?
The operating system must be able to keep track of the various active processes.
The operating system must allocate and de-allocate various resources for each active process.
The operating system must protect the data and physical resources of each process against
unintended interference by other processes. This involves techniques that relate to memory, files, and
I/O devices.
The results of a process must be independent of the speed at which the execution is carried out
relative to the speed of other concurrent process.

4) What are the contexts in which concurrency may occur?

Concurrency may arise in three different contexts.
Multiple applications: -Processing time of the computer to be dynamically shared among a number of
active jobs or applications
Structured application: - With principles of modular design and structured programming some
applications can be effectively implemented as a set of concurrent process.
Operating system structure: -The same structuring advantages apply to the system programmer.

5) What is a data register and address register?

Data registers can be assigned to a variety of functions by the programmer. They can be used with
any machine instruction that performs operations on data.
Address registers contain main memory addresses of data and instructions or they contain a portion of
the address that is used in the calculation of the complete addresses.

6) What are server operating systems?

These run on servers, which are very large personal computers, work stations, or even mainframes.
They serve multiple users at once over a network and allow the users to share hardware and software
resources. Server O.S. provide various functions such as file and print service, or web service. Typical
server operating systems are UNIX and Windows 2000.

7) Describe system calls for file management?

To make changes a file must be opened. This call specifies the file name to be opened, either as an
absolute path name or relative to the working directory, and a code of O_RDONLY, O_WRONLY or
O_RDWR, meaning open for reading, writing or both. The file descriptor can then be used for reading
or writing.

8) Describe about MULTICS?

MULTICS is described as having a series of concentric rings, with the inner ones being more privileged
than the outer ones. When a procedure in an outer ring wanted to call a procedure in an inner ring, it
had to make the equivalent of a system call which is a TRAP instruction. MULTICS hardware made it
possible to designate individual process as protected against reading, writing, or executing.

9) Describe about threads?

Different threads in a process are not quite as independent as different process. All threads share the
same global variables as they have the same address space. One thread can read, write, or even
completely wipe out another threads stack.

10) Describe the mechanism of upcall?

When the kernel knows that a thread has blocked, the kernel notifies the processes run time system,
passing as parameters on the stack the number of the thread in question and a description of the
event that occurred. The notification happens by having the kernel activate the run-time system at a
known starting address, roughly analogous to a signal in UNIX.

11) Give an example of page replacement in the areas of computer design?

Majority of the computers have more than one memory caches consisting of 32-byte or 64-byte blocks
of memory. Whenever a cache is full then some part of the block should be chosen for removal. This
problem is precisely the same page replacement except on a shorter time scale.
12) Describe about preemptive scheduling algorithm?
A preemptive scheduling algorithm picks a process and lets it run for a maximum of some fixed time.
If it is still running at the end of the time interval, it is suspended and the scheduler picks another
process to run. Doing preemptive scheduling requires having a clock interrupt occur at the end of the
time interval to give control of the CPU back to the scheduler.

13) Give a case situation where a scheduling is needed?

When an interrupt occurs, a scheduling decision may be made. If the interrupt came from an I/O
device that has now completed its work, some process that was blocked waiting for the I/O may now
be ready to run. It is up to the scheduler to decide if the newly ready process should run or not.

14) Describe about checkpointing?

Checkpointing a process means that its state is written to a file so that it can be restarted later. The
checkpoint contains not only the memory image, but also the resource state, that is, which resources
are currently assigned to the process. To be most effective, new checkpoints should not overwrite old
ones but should be written to new files. Whole sequences of checkpoint files are accumulated due to
the process getting executed.

15) Describe the two phases of two-phase locking?

In the first phase, the process tries to lock all the records it needs, one at a time. If it succeeds, it
begins the second phase, performing its updates and releasing the locks. No real work is done in the
first phase.

16) Explain about deadlocks in operating systems?

Deadlock is a potential problem in any operating system. It occurs when a group of processes each
have been granted exclusive access to some resources, and each one wants yet another resource that
belongs to another process in the group. All of then are blocked and non will ever run again.

17) Explain about the paging systems?

Paging systems can be modeled by abstracting the page reference string from the program and using
the same reference string with different algorithms. These models can be used to make some
predictions about paging behavior. Attention to issues such as determining the working set, memory
allocations, and page size are required.