Study Guide for Midterm Exam 1 - System Architecture and Software | CS 370, Exams of Computer Science

Download Study Guide for Midterm Exam 1 - System Architecture and Software | CS 370 and more Exams Computer Science in PDF only on Docsity! CS370: Systems Architecture & Software Study Guide for Midterm Exam 1 (Test 1) Description: Following are some questions to help you study for Midterm Exam 1. These questions are meant as a starting point for studying, not as a complete description of the material to be covered on the exam. The instructor reserves the right to ask questions of sorts not in this list or covering material from lecture or the text that is not specifically addressed by this list. One important type of question not in this list for which you should be prepared is to provide definitions for important terms and concepts given in lecture or the text. This exam will cover Chapters 1 through 5 from the Silbershatz, Galvin & Gagne text. It will not cover any material from Chapter 6 or later in the text. S,G & G: Chapter 1 1. Text Questions: 1.13, 1.17 2. Define operating systems in terms of what they do. 3. What is dual mode operation? How does the system switch between modes? 4. What is the difference between I/O-bound jobs and CPU-bound jobs? 5. What is multiprogramming? 6. What is time-sharing? What are the main advantages of time-sharing? 7. How is time-sharing usually implemented? 8. What is a multiprocessor system? 9. What is a real-time system? List examples. 10. What is an interrupt vector? 11. What operations might a monitor or supervisor program consider illegal – and why? 12. List instructions that might be usable only from supervisor mode in a dual-mode processor. 13. What resources must be protected by the operating system? S,G & G: Chapter 2 1. Text Questions: 2.13, 2.18, 2.24 2. Describe the layered approach for the structure of operating systems. What are some advan- tages/disadvantages? 3. What is a kernel? 4. What is a virtual machine? 1 5. What is a command interpreter? How can one be implemented? S,G & G: Chapter 3 1. What is a process? What is the difference between a process and a program? 2. What is a PCB? 3. List some of the queues on a typical operating system. Describe the function of each. 4. What does the long-term scheduler do? 5. What does the medium-term scheduler do? 6. What does the short-term scheduler do? 7. What is the degree of multiprogramming? 8. When is the long-term scheduler invoked? 9. What is time sharing? What kind of scheduling does it involve? 10. What is swapping? 11. What is a context switch? What does the kernel do during a context switch? (What is the difference between this and the previous question?) 12. Describe the producer/consumer problem. 13. What happens at process creation and termination? 14. What is IPC? 15. Describe the difference between direct and indirect communication. 16. What is the difference between asymmetric and symmetric direct communication? 17. What capacity may a IPC buffer have? How does the capacity affect the communication? S,G & G: Chapter 4 1. Text Questions: 4.10 2. What is a thread? 3. How does a thread differ from a process? 4. How can threads be useful in Java? 5. Describe how user threads differ from kernel threads. 6. Describe the actions taken by a kernel to context switch between kernel-level threads. 2