CS 3733 Operating Systems Midterm Exam Review: Fall 2003
This will be a closed book exam.
Listed here are the major topics covered on the midterm exam.
This list will be updated shortly before the midterm to reflect the
topics covered before the midterm.
1. Introduction: what is an operating system?
buffering, spooling, multiprogramming, time sharing, distributed systems.
2. Processes
process state, process control block, concurrent processes,
independent and cooperating processes,
3. C programming
storage and linkage classes, the meaning of the word static.
4. Process scheduling
job queue, ready queue, device queues, schedulers, performance criteria,
FCFS, SJF, SJFA, round robin, priorities, preemptive scheduling,
multilevel queues, multilevel feedback queues,
process scheduling simulator experiments,
load average and context switch calculations.
5. Using fork, wait, and exec
chains, fans, and trees of processes
6. Unix system calls
open, close, read, write, pipe dup2, getpid, getppid.
7. I/O in Unix and C
file descriptors and file pointers, file descriptor table,
system file table, redirection.
8. Unix directory structure
directories, inodes, hard links, symbolic links,
9. Rings of processes
10. Synchronization
producer-consumer problem, critical sections, critical section problem,
mutual exclusion, progress, bounded waiting, busy waiting, Peterson's solution,
synchronization hardware, semaphores.