Unit 1: Operating System Overview

1. List the elements of a computer system.

2. What are the two modes in which a program can execute? Compare them.

3. What is an operating system?

4. State the functions of an operating system.

5. What are the main purposes of operating system?

6. List the services of operating system.

7. What is an instruction execution?

8. List the categories of Processor action.

9. What are privileged instructions?

10. What is an interrupt? List the classes of interrupts.

11. What is an interrupt? State its advantage.

12. What are the approaches taken to handle multiple interrupts?

13. What is a trap?

14. List the types of memory in a computer system.

15. What is a cache memory? State the need for cache memory.

16. What is meant by principle of locality of reference?

17. What is a disk cache?

18. What is DMA?

19. What are the three techniques used for I/O operations?

20. What are system calls?

21. What is the purpose of system calls?

22. How is protection for memory provided by OS?

23. State use of fork and exec system calls.

24. What are the two models of communication in a system?

25. Can system calls be made directly from a high level language program?

26. What is an API? List the common API available for application programmer.

27. List the three types of interface in a computer system.

28. State the advantage of using API over system calls.

29. What are the three methods used by programs to pass parameters to OS?

30. What are system programs?

31. What are system utilities?

32. What is a kernel?

33. What are the main goals of designing an operating system?

34. Draw the UNIX system structure.

35. Draw the system structure of any one operating system.

36. What are the main advantages of the microkernel approach to system design?

37. What is the main advantage of the layered approach to system design?

38. What is a batch system?

39. What are time shared systems?

40. What is RTOS?

41. What is a real time system?

42. Compare batch operating system and time sharing operating system.

43. Differentiate time sharing systems and multiprogrammed batch systems.

44. Compare Uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems.

45. What is SMP? List its characteristics.

46. What is multiprogramming? List its advantages?

47. Compare multiprogramming and multiprocessor systems.

48. What is multicore organization?

49. Discuss the difference between symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing.

50. Mention the advantages in using multiprogramming systems.

51. What is the main advantage of multiprogramming?

52. What are the advantages of multiprocessor systems?

53. How does multiprogramming increase CPU utilization?

54. List out the three main advantages of multi-processor system.

55. What is context switch?

56. What is data parallelism?

57. What is task parallelism?

58. What are the three approaches to providing parallelism?

59. What is SYSGEN?

60. What is meant by system boot?

61. What is a boot strap program?

62. What is a boot disk?