1. What is busy waiting?

The repeated execution of a loop of code while waiting for an event to occur is called busy-waiting. The CPU is not engaged in any real productive activity during this period, and the process does not progress toward completion.

2. Explain Belady's Anomaly.

Also called FIFO anomaly. Usually, on increasing the number of frames allocated to a process' virtual memory, the process execution is faster, because fewer page faults occur. Sometimes, the reverse happens, i.e., the execution time increases even when more frames are allocated to the process. This is Belady's Anomaly. This is true for certain page reference patterns.

3. What is a trap and trapdoor?

Trapdoor is a secret undocumented entry point into a program used to grant access without normal methods of access authentication. A trap is a software interrupt, usually the result of an error condition.

4. What is page cannibalizing?

Page swapping or page replacements are called page cannibalizing.

5. What are demand- and pre-paging?

With demand paging, a page is brought into memory only when a location on that page is actually referenced during execution. With pre-paging, pages other than the one demanded by a page fault are brought in. The selection of such pages is done based on common access patterns, especially for secondary memory devices.

6. How many jobs can be run concurrently on MVT?
15 jobs

7. What is SMP?

To achieve maximum efficiency and reliability a mode of operation known as symmetric multiprocessing is used. In essence, with SMP any process or threads can be assigned to any processor.

8. What are turnaround time and response time?

Turnaround time is the interval between the submission of a job and its completion. Response time is the interval between submission of a request, and the first response to that request.

9. What is a binary semaphore? What is its use?

A binary semaphore is one, which takes only 0 and 1 as values. They are used to implement mutual exclusion and synchronize concurrent processes.

10. What is time-stamping?

It is a technique proposed by Lamport, used to order events in a distributed system without the use of clocks. This scheme is intended to order events consisting of the transmission of messages. Each system 'i' in the network maintains a counter Ci. Every time a system transmits a message, it increments its counter by 1 and attaches the time-stamp Ti to the message. When a message is received, the receiving system 'j' sets its counter Cj to 1 more than the maximum of its current value and the incoming time-stamp Ti.

At each site, the ordering of messages is determined by the following rules:

For messages x from site i and y from site j, x precedes y if one of the following conditions holds....(a) if Ti<Tj or (b) if Ti=Tj and i<j

11. Is Windows NT a full blown object oriented operating system? Give reasons.

No Windows NT is not so, because its not implemented in object oriented language and the data structures reside within one executive component and are not represented as objects and it does not support object oriented capabilities .

12. Describe the Buddy system of memory allocation.

Free memory is maintained in linked lists, each of equal sized blocks. Any such block is of size 2^k. When some memory is required by a process, the block size of next higher order is chosen, and broken into two. Note that the two such pieces differ in address only in their kth bit. Such pieces are called buddies. When any used block is freed, the OS checks to see if its buddy is also free. If so, it is rejoined, and put into the original free-block linked-list.

13. What is thrashing?

It is a phenomenon in virtual memory schemes when the processor spends most of its time swapping pages, rather than executing instructions. This is due to an inordinate number of page faults.

14. What are local and global page replacements?

Local replacement means that an incoming page is brought in only to the relevant process' address space.

Global replacement policy allows any page frame from any process to be replaced. The latter is applicable to variable partitions model only.

15. What is meant by arm-stickiness?

If one or a few processes have a high access rate to data on one track of a storage disk, then they may monopolize the device by repeated requests to that track. This generally happens with most common device scheduling algorithms (LIFO, SSTF, C-SCAN, etc). High-density multisurface disks are more likely to be affected by this than low density ones.