National University of Singapore

School of Computing
CS2106 Tutorial 9 Semester 1 10/11

1. What are some advantages and disadvantages of placing functionalities such as error check-
ing in a device controller, rather than in the kernel?

2. Polling for an I/O completion can waste CPU cycles if the processor busy-waits before the
I/O completes. On the other hand, when the I/O device is ready for service, polling can be
much more efficient, compared to handling an interrupt. Describe a hybrid strategy that
combines polling, sleeping, and interrupts for I/O device service. For each of these three
strategies (pure polling, pure interrupts, hybrid), describe the characteristics of the I/O
operations in which the strategy is more efficient than the others.

3. A single interrupt is typically raised after completion of I/O and handled by the CPU. In
certain OS implementations, however, the code that is to be executed at the completion
of the I/O is split into two pieces. The first pieces executes immediately after the I/O
completes. This piece of code then schedules the remaining pieces of code to be executed
later.
How can this strategy be beneficial?

4. Consider a DMA controller that supports virtual addresses (instead of physical addresses)
as the targets of I/O operations. How would this complicates the design of the DMA
controllers? (Note that MMU is typically placed on the path between CPU and memory,
and is not accessible by DMA controllers).