Tutorial 1

1. What is an Operating System?

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2. What are the important functions of an operating System?
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3. What are the three components of Linux Operating System?
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4. Operating systems keep evolving over the period of time. List all the
types of an OS during the evolving period.
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5. Differentiate between multi-tasking and multi-programming.
MULTI-TASKING

MULTI-PROGRAMMING

6. What is an interrupt.
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7. How multiple interrupts are dealt with?
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8. What is a cache?
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9. What is the difference between multi-processor and multi-core system.
MULTI-PROCESSOR SYSTEM

10.

MULTI-CORE SYSTEM

In a CPU, cache access time is 500ns and main memory access

time is 2 s. If a block if found, on average, 90% of the time in cache,

what is the average access time.

11.

A DMA module is transferring characters to main memory from an

external device transmitting at 8K bits per second (bps). The processor

can fetch instructions at the rate of 1 million instructions per second. By
how much will the processor be slowed down due to the DMA activity?
Ignore data read/write operations and assume the processor only fetches
instructions.

12.

A computer has a cache, main memory, and a disk used for virtual

memory. If a referenced word is in the cache, 20 ns are required to

access it. If it is in main memory but not in the cache, 60 ns are needed
to load it into the cache (this includes the time to originally check the
cache), and then the reference is started again. If the word is not in main
memory, 12 ms are required to fetch the word from disk, followed by 60
ns to copy it to the cache, and then the reference is started again. The
cache hit ratio is 0.9 and the main-memory hit ratio is 0.6.What is the
average time in ns required to access a referenced word on this system?

13.
Define a process.
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14.
List all the possible states of a process.
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15.
What are the elements of PCB?
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16.

Describe the three state process model, describe what transitions

are valid between the three states, and describe an event that might
cause such a transition.
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17.
What is the function of the ready queue?
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18.
What is the relationship between threads and processes?
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19.

Describe how a multi-threaded application can be supported by a

user-level threads package. It may be helpful to consider (and draw) the

components of such a package, and the function they perform.
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20.

Name some advantages and disadvantages of user-level threads.

ADVANTAGES

DISADVANTAGES

21.
What is the function of dispatcher?
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22.
What is swapping and what is its purpose?
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23.
Why do we need two modes (user and kernel)?
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24.
What are the steps performed by an OS to create a process?
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25.
What is the difference between interrupt and trap?
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26.
List mechanisms for interrupting an execution of a process.
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27.

What is the difference between mode switch and process switch?

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28.
What is a thread?
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29.

List four basic operations associated with the change is thread

state.
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30.
What are the key benefits of threads compared to process:
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31.
Define ULT advantage over and KLT
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