QUESTION BANK CAT I

OPERATING SYSTEMS
PART A
1. What are the advantages of distributed systems?
Resource sharing
Reliability
Load balancing
Easy communication link

2. Differentiate Hard real time system and soft real time system.
Hard real time system: Critical task must be completed within the
specified time and the data is stored in short term memory ROM
Soft real time system: Critical task with more priority is executed making
other tasks to wait and Virtual memory is used.

3. List the system calls for device management.
request device, release device
read, write, reposition
get device attributes, set device attributes
logically attach or detach devices

4. What are the two models of communication?
Message passing model: Information is exchanged through an
interprocess-communication facility provided by OS.
Shared memory model: Process uses map memory system calls to gain
access to regions of memory owned by other processes.

5. Give the two scenarios at which thread cancellation occurs.
Asynchronous cancellation: one thread immediately terminates the target
thread.
Deferred cancellation: The target thread can periodically check if it
should terminate.

6. List the benefits of multithreaded programming.
Responsiveness
Resource sharing
Economy
Utilization of multiprocessor architectures

7. Define waiting time and turnaround time.
Waiting time: It is the sum of the time or periods spent waiting in the
ready queue.
Turnaround time: It is the interval from the time of submission of a
process to the time of completion.

8. What is starvation and how it can be prevented?
Starvation is indefinite blocking of a process ie low priority process made
to starve for the CPU to be released by high priority process. This
problem can be solved by aging ie incrementing the low priority of a
process to high priority.

9. Differentiate Deadlock prevention and Deadlock avoidance.
Deadlock prevention: It is a set of methods for ensuring that at least one
of the necessary conditions for the deadlock do not hold.
Deadlock avoidance: Operating system will be given in advance
additional information concerning which resources a process will request
and use during its lifetime.

10. Give the necessary conditions for the Deadlock to occur.
Mutual exclusion
Hold and Wait
No preemption
Circular wait

11. How is the Deadlock recovered?
Process termination: Abort all deadlocked processes or abort one process
at a time until the deadlock cycle is eliminated.
Resource preemption: Three issues to be addressed are Selecting a victim,
Rollback and starvation.

12. What are the methods used for handling deadlocks?
Use a protocol to prevent or avoid deadlock ensuring that system will
never enter a deadlock state.
Allow the system to enter a deadlock state, detect it and recover.
Ignore the problem altogether and pretend that deadlock never occurs in
the system.
PART B
1. What is the purpose of system calls? Briefly explain the types of
System calls provided by a typical operating system.

2. Explain in detail about the FCFS, SJFS, Priority and Round Robin
scheduling algorithms with a Suitable example.

3. Enumerate in detail about the system components of operating
system.

4. Calculate average waiting time and average turnaround time for the
FCFS, Preemptive SJF and Round Robin ( 1 time unit) algorithms

Process Arrival Time Burst time
P1 0 8
P2 1 4
P3 2 9
P4 3 5

5. Explain in detail about Deadlock detection with a suitable example.

6. Explain in detail about the issues involved in threading.

7. How Deadlock can be avoided? Explain Banker's algorithm with an
example?