CS 3733 Operating Systems, Spring 2003 Midterm Exam Comments

We will go over the exam in class.

The class average was 76 and the grade distribution was as follows:

Comments about individual problems:
  1. The question did not ask what a buffer was. While the term buffering may have several meanings, it has only one definition as discussed in the class notes, and the term spooling should not be ambiguous.
  2. This was similar to a problem at the beginning of the notes on Fork
  3. Most people figured out that in the first case the processes read different parts of the file and in the second case they both read from the beginning of the file. Some people knew that the output could be interleaved. Few realized that requesting 5 bytes does not mean that 5 bytes would be read.
  4. This problem related to the diagram in Figure 4.1 of the Silberschatz text and discussed in class. Note that when a child terminates this could cause the parent to return from a wait.
  5. Part b) gave people the most trouble. If not process is able to write to a pipe, then a read will return 0, indicating end of file.
  6. This was similar to the problem given in class on January 28.
  7. Few people had trouble with this one.