Operating System Questions

1. The basic functions of an operating system are: managing resources, providing user interface, support for built in utility programs, running applications and the computer hardware. 2. Paging is used for retrieving data from secondary storage and using it in main memory. 3. To copy the entire diskette on DOS type in the command diskcopy a:. 4. When a thread is created the threads do not require any new resources to execute thread shares the resources like memory of the process to which they belong to. Where as if a new process creation is very heavyweight because it always requires new address space to be created and even if they share the memory then the inter process communication is expensive when compared to the communication between the threads. 5. Virtual memory is a system whereby addressable memory is extended beyond main storage through the use of secondary storage managed by system software in such a way that programs can treat all the designated storage as addressable main storage . 6. Throughput is the average rate of successful message delivery over a communication channel. Turnaround Time is the total time taken between the submission of a program for execution and the return of the complete output to the user. Waiting time is the amount of time spent in a queue waiting to be served. The time a generic system or functional unit takes to react to a given input. 7. The state of the processor when a process is waiting for event is the pending state. 8. A real time operating system has well defined fixed time constraints. Process must be done within the defined constraints or the system will fail. 9. Hard real time is a system that guarantees that critical tasks complete on time. Soft real time is where a critical real time task gets priority over other tasks and retains that priority until it completes. 10. Thrashing is a situation where large amounts of computer resources are used to do a minimal amount of work, with the system in a continual sate resource contention. The system can detect thrashing by evaluating the level of CPU utilization as compared to the level of multiprogramming. It can be eliminated by reducing the level of multiprogramming. 11. Multi tasking is the logical extension of multiprogramming. Multiprogramming is the technique of running several programs at a time using timesharing. Multi threading is an application typically implemented as a separate process with several threads of control. 12. Hard disk is the secondary storage device which holds the data or bulk, and it holds the data on the magnetic medium of the hard disk, the magnetic medium can be easily erased or rewritten. 13. Fragmentation occurs in a dynamic memory allocation system when many of the free blocks are too small to satisfy any request. A

14. DRAM is not the best, but its cheap, does the job, and is available almost everywhere you look. DRAM data resides in a cell made of a capacitor and a transistor. Dispatcher module gives control of the CPU to the process selected by the short term scheduler. 15. Selects from among the processes in memory that are ready to execute, and allocate the CPU to one of them. 16. Switching the CPU to another process requires saving the state of the old process and loading the saved state for the new process. 17. Cache memory is random access memory that a computer microprocessor can access more quickly than it can access regular RAM. 18. When a process requests an available resource, system must decide if immediate allocation leaves the system in a safe state. System is in safe state if there exists a safe sequence of all processes. Deadlock avoidance: ensure that a system will never enter a unsafe state. 19. A real time operating system is an operating system that can run real time processes successfully. 20. In real time processing, there is a continual input, process and output of data. In batch processing a group of transactions collected over a period of time is collected, entered, processed and then the barch results are produced.