CS 3733 Operating Systems Midterm Exam Review: Spring 2004
This will be a closed book exam.
Listed here are the major topics covered on the midterm exam.
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 (like from assignment 2).
Know how to do problems like the one
assigned in class
5. Using fork, wait, and exec
chains, fans, and trees of processes
6. Unix system calls
open, close, read, write, pipe dup2, getpid, getppid.
Understand that read and write do not always process all information
requested. Exception: small write to a pipe or FIFO.
7. I/O in Unix and C
file descriptors and file pointers, file descriptor table,
system file table, redirection.
Understand the difference in buffering when using file descriptors and file
pointers.
8. Unix directory structure
directories, inodes, hard links, symbolic links,
9. Rings of processes
10. Synchronization
producer-consumer problem