1. What is a Real-Time System? 

A real time process is a process that must respond to the events within a certain time period. A real time operating system is an operating system that can run real time processes successfully

2. What is fragmentation? Different types of fragmentation?

Fragmentation occurs in a dynamic memory allocation system when many of the free blocks are too small to satisfy any request.

External Fragmentation : External Fragmentation happens when a dynamic memory allocation algorithm allocates some memory and a small piece is left over that cannot be effectively used. If too much external fragmentation occurs, the amount of usable memory is drastically reduced. Total memory space exists to satisfy a request, but it is not contiguous.

Internal Fragmentation : Internal fragmentation is the space wasted inside of allocated memory blocks because of restriction on the allowed sizes of allocated blocks. Allocated memory may be slightly larger than requested memory; this size difference is memory internal to a partition, but not being used.

3. What is virtual memory? 

Virtual memory is hardware technique where the system appears to have more memory that it actually does. This is done by time-sharing, the physical memory and storage parts of the memory one disk when they are not actively being used.

4. What is DRAM? In which form does it store data? 

DRAM is not the best, but it’s cheap, does the job, and is available almost everywhere you look. DRAM data resides in a cell made of a capacitor and a transistor. The capacitor tends to lose data unless it’s recharged every couple of milliseconds, and this recharging tends to slow down the performance of DRAM compared to speedier RAM types.

5. What is the state of the processor, when a process is waiting for some event to occur?

Waiting state

6. What is Dispatcher? 

Dispatcher module gives control of the CPU to the process selected by the short-term scheduler; this involves: Switching context, Switching to user mode, Jumping to the proper location in the user program to restart that program, dispatch latency – time it takes for the dispatcher to stop one process and start another running.

7. What are the basic functions of an operating system? 

Operating system controls and coordinates the use of the hardware among the various applications programs for various uses. Operating system acts as resource allocator and manager. Since there are many possibly conflicting requests for resources the operating system must decide which requests are allocated resources to operating the computer system efficiently and fairly. Also operating system is control program which controls the user programs to prevent errors and improper use of the computer. It is especially concerned with the operation and control of I/O devices.

8. What is the cause of thrashing? How does the system detect thrashing? Once it detects thrashing, what can the system do to eliminate this problem? 

Thrashing is caused by under allocation of the minimum number of pages required by a process, forcing it to continuously page fault. 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.

9. What is cache memory?

Cache memory is random access memory (RAM) that a computer microprocessor can access more quickly than it can access regular RAM. As the microprocessor processes data, it looks first in the cache memory and if it finds the data there (from a previous reading of data), it does not have to do the more time-consuming reading of data from larger memory.

10. What is Context Switch? 

Switching the CPU to another process requires saving the state of the old process and loading the saved state for the new process. This task is known as a context switch. Context-switch time is pure overhead, because the system does no useful work while switching. Its speed varies from machine to machine, depending on the memory speed, the number of registers which must be copied, the existed of special instructions(such as a single instruction to load or store all registers).