Operating Systems (CS-405) - Important Questions

Explain the evolution of operating systems and the characteristics of modern operating systems.

Define an operating system and explain its goals, functions and system management tasks.

Discuss operating system services and the role of system calls in resource management.

Explain the five major activities of an operating system with respect to memory management.

Explain security problems in a multiprogramming and time-sharing environment and whether the same degree of security as a dedicated machine can be ensured.

Explain the five major activities of an operating system with respect to process management.

Write short notes on worms and virus, demand paging, batch processing, and time-sharing.

What is meant by system call? How it can be used. How does an application program use these call during execution?

Write short note on time sharing.

Explain file systems and disk organization/structure, including how data is read from and written to disk.

Calculate total head movement distance to service a request queue using SSTF / SCAN / LOOK disk scheduling starting from current head position.

Compare contiguous and indexed file allocation methods.

Give an example of an application in which data in a file should be accessed in following order.

Explain why some operating systems track file types while others do not, and discuss which approach is better.

Explain how logical to physical address mapping is accomplished for contiguous, linked and indexed file allocation.

Define what a file is and describe its attributes and operations.

Explain the difference between SCAN and LOOK disk scheduling algorithms.

List the advantages and disadvantages of Magnetic Tape memory.

Explain in detail about various ways of free space management.

What is a file? Briefly explain different directory structures. What kind of directory structure is used in UNIX?

Explain what a process is (including difference from program and overview of process management) and explain the process life cycle / process states with the process state transition diagram.

Explain overlays, dynamic loading and dynamic linking for execution of large programs in memory management.

Calculate the number of page faults for the given reference string and page frames using page replacement algorithms (FIFO / LRU / Optimal).

Compare common CPU scheduling algorithms and explain the criteria used for their evaluation.

Explain the concept of threads and multiprocessor / multiple processor scheduling

Discuss process management system calls and their importance.

Compare partitioning, paging and segmentation techniques.

Discuss paged segmentation and virtual memory with demand paging.

Compare threads vs processes, including resources used on creation

Explain the effect, advantages and drawbacks of allowing duplicate PCB pointers in a Round Robin ready queue.

Given a segment table, compute physical addresses for given logical addresses.

Explain whether a system can detect process starvation and how to deal with the starvation problem.

Explain binary and counting semaphores with examples and their use for process synchronization.

Write the semaphore-based solution for the dining philosophers problem.

Explain concurrency / concurrent programming, including concurrency controls and differences between real and virtual concurrency.

Explain I/O programming principles and I/O interfaces.

Compare asynchronous and concurrent I/O operations.

Write short note on deadlock prevention and avoidance.

Suppose a process P wants to wait for two messages, one from mailbox A and one from mailbox B. What sequence of send and receive should it execute.

Why might a system use interrupt driven I/O to manage a single serial port but polling I/O to manage a front end processor, such as a terminal concentrator.

Write short notes on synchronization, paging, and system calls.

Explain the meaning of busy waiting, other types of waiting in an operating system, and whether busy waiting can be avoided altogether.

Explain the concept of buffering and spooling.

Explain methods for recovery from deadlock.

List three possible types of failures that can occur in a distributed system.

Compare Unix/Linux and Windows operating systems.

What aspects/features of a distributed system would be selected if running on a totally reliable network?

Describe a method for process migration across different architectures with (i) the same operating system and (ii) different operating systems.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of making the computer network transparent to the user?

What are the benefits of a distributed file system (DFS) compared to a centralized file system?

Explain the file systems used in Linux and Windows.

Discuss the design issues of a distributed operating system.

Write short notes on Remote Procedure Call (RPC).

Write short notes: Virus