OS practice Oral questions :- 22/10/2007

1. what is an OS ?
2. Give the basic functions of an OS
3. Define the terms multi-programming,multitasking,multiuser,multiprocessing
4. what is a process,what is a thread ?,define multithreading
5. differentiate between thread creation and process creation due to fork.
6. What are the widely used IPC mechanisms
7. what is a shell ?,give eg of different type of shells
8. what is a shell script ?
9. can you fasion the environment for a shell ?
10. what does Red Hat 10…kernel 2.4.32 mean ?
11. differences between Linux and Unix
12. name the native Linus and Unix file systems
13. what are utilities ? where do they reside ?
14. What is an orphan process,zombie process ?
15. how to avoid zombie creation?
16. Is creation of zombies a good phenomenon ?,if not, why ?
17. what are semaphores ? what are binary and counting semaphores?
18. what does wait operation on semaphores do ? what does signal operation on
semaphores do ?
19. Can you use semaphores to guard shared resources ?,shared memory too ?
20. Explain functions semget,semop,semctl
21. Explain threading functions…pthread_create,pthread_join,
pthread_exit,pthread_detach
22. Explain the key functionalities of the kernel
23. What is a race condition ? can it be avoided by semaphores?
24. what are process groups?
25. explain the booting process of Linux/Unix
26. what are virtual terminals in a linux setup?
27. Explain mount,unmount system calls
28. Explain the file system hierarchy in Linux
29. What is the difference between named and unnamed pipes ?
30. Give system calls for creating both named and unnamed pipes
31. What is an orphan process,write the program code to create a new process by fork
32. explain getpid();,getppid(); …..UID,PID,real UID,effective UID and saved UID
33. what is AWK ? differentiate between AWK and C
34. Give few features of AWK
35. Give the program structure for AWK ,what are patterns and actions

M V Phatak
There are NO extra practice problems.Doing WELL in already
given assignments is more than ENOUGH.