SI411 Operating Systems

Fall AY07

6 Week Exam: During Class on Friday, 22 Sept 2006.

· The 6-week exam is closed book.

· As per the course policy, only non-programmable calculators may be used on the exam.

· The exam will cover chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of the Silberschatz text, and chapters 2, 15 and 16 of the Deitel text.

· The following exam objectives are intended to aid you in your preparations for the course's examinations. However, the following are not considered to be inclusive of all the testable material from this course. All assigned reading material, supplemental handouts, class lectures, class discussions, homework, labs, programming projects, and in-class problem-solving sessions are considered testable material.

Introduction to operating systems

• identify the activities the operating system must deal with to support multitasking
• explain the benefits of having an operating system supervises user processes.
• distinguish tightly coupled distributed systems from loosely coupled distributed systems
• distinguish symmetric multiprocessor systems from asymmetric multiprocessor systems
• determine the amount of wasted CPU time given the amount of time an I/O or other operation takes, and the amount of time the CPU is involved in the I/O operation.

Computer system operation

• understand the role of the base and limits registers in providing protection
• identify the storage structures of computer memory
• explain the concept of an interrupt driven operating system
• explain protection mechanisms that support the OS such as dual-mode, I/O, Memory, and CPU protection.
• describe why it is necessary for a CPU and I/O operations to be overlapped
• describe interrupt driven data transfer
• describe DMA data transfer
• compare interrupt-driven and DMA driven data transfer
• apply knowledge of base and limits registers to determine is a memory reference is within the portion of memory allocated to a process.

OS Structures

• understand the shared-memory form of communication between processes
• understand the shared-memory form of communication between processes
• understand the role of the command-interpreter system with respect to the operating system and system calls.
• list the five major activities of an operating system with regard to process management.
• explain the approach to system structure taken by the UNIX operating system
• explain the approach to system structure taken by the MS-DOS operating system
• explain the approach to system structure taken by the IBM VM operating system
• determine the communication model being used between multiple processes.
• describe the role of volatility on memory management
• describe the resources needed for process management
• compare and contrast the approaches to system structure taken by the MS-DOS, UNIX, and IBM VM operating systems.
• be able to compare and contrast the shared-memory and message-passing models of inter-process communication.

Processes

• understand the role of the UNIX system call fork() in process creation
• understand the role of the short-term scheduler
• understand the role of the medium-term scheduler
• understand the role of the long-term scheduler
• understand the impact of context-switching on the throughput of an operating system.
• understand the context of a process
• understand the characterization of a process as I/O bound.or CPU bound
• understand independent vs cooperating processes
• understand how an operating system impacts the progression of a process from creation to termination.
• explain the role of process scheduling queues
• explain the concept of process state
• explain the basic producer-consumer problem
• distinguish between bounded and unbounded buffers.
• describe the role of process control blocks with regard to a process
• describe the impact of the characterization of a process as I/O bound or CPU bound on the scheduling of the process
• describe context switching
• describe a process
• be able to evaluate multiple processes to determine if they are independent or cooperating
• be able to characterize a process as I/O bound or CPU bound

Threads

• explain the resource needs of Solaris 2 kernel threads, lightweight processes, and user-level threads
• explain the hybrid approach that Solaris 2 takes to threads
• distinguish between physical concurrency and logical concurrency
• distinguish between a process, a lightweight process a heavyweight process and a thread
• describe the actions taken by the thread library to context switch between user-level threads in Solaris 2.
• describe the actions taken by the kernel to context switch between kernel-level threads in Solaris 2.
• define a thread
• define a process

CPU Scheduling

• Understand the role of CPU-I/O burst cycles with regard to short-term scheduling.
• Understand the role of characterizing CPU bound or I/O bound jobs on CPU scheduling
• Understand the criteria used to evaluate CPU scheduling algorithms.
• Understand Multilevel queue scheduling, and multilevel feedback queue scheduling
• Understand how the various CPU scheduling algorithms are applied
• Regarding the process life cycle, explain the opportunities that exist for invoking preemptive and/or non-preemptive scheduling
• Distinguish between the various CPU scheduling algorithms.
• Describe the various approaches for evaluating CPU scheduling algorithms
• Describe the role of offered load on CPU scheduling
• Describe preemptive CPU scheduling
• Describe non-preemptive CPU scheduling
• Be able to apply the CPU scheduling algorithms to a given set of arriving process burst times.
• Analyze a scheduling situation and be able to describe which scheduling algorithm would be most appropriate to use.
• Analyze a process's CPU-I/O burst cycle and characterize it as CPU Bound or I/O bound

Java Programming Language Issues

• understand the basic components of Java
• understand how Java threads can be made to "share" a common structure such as an array
• understand how Java applications are executed
• understand how a Java thread transitions from one state to another
• explain the rationale for "deprecating" a Java method
• explain the process/mechanisms through which Java programs can be written on a computer architecture different from the architecture of the computer on which the Java code is executed.
• explain how a Java thread is started
• explain how a Java thread is created
• distinguish between "extends" and "implements" in the context of inheritance
• describe the states that a Java thread can be in
• describe the role of the Java Virtual Machine.
• describe the mechanism's that Java provides for thread synchronization.
• describe the byte-oriented nature of Java I/O
• describe communication between a Java thread and a "main" Java application
• classify various models of inheritance
• be able to compare C++ exception handling with Java exception handling