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.

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

A disk drive has cylinders numbered 0 to 4999. Starting from the current head position, calculate total head movement distance to service a request queue using SSTF / SCAN / LOOK disk scheduling algorithms.

Compare contiguous and indexed file allocation methods with respect to access, fragmentation and reliability.

Explain what a process is including difference between program and process and explain the process life cycle / process states with the process state transition diagram.

For the given reference string and page frames, calculate the number of page faults using page replacement algorithms FIFO / LRU / Optimal.

Compare threads vs processes, including resources used on creation.

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

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

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.

Write short note on deadlock prevention and avoidance.

To build robust distributed systems, list three possible types of failures that can occur in a distributed system.

Compare Unix/Linux and Windows operating systems.