CS 3733 Operating Systems Second Midterm Exam Review: Spring 2005

A tentative list of topics appears here.
It will be updated before the exam.

Note that the beginning topics are the same as those for the first exam.

buffering, spooling, multiprogramming, time sharing

process state, process control block, concurrent processes

storage and linkage classes, the meaning of the word static.

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.

chains, fans, and trees of processes

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.

file descriptors and file pointers, file descriptor table, system file table, redirection.
Understand the difference in buffering when using file descriptors and file pointers.

directories, inodes, hard links, symbolic links,

pipes, FIFOs
Note: The exam does not cover the topic of Terminal Control

10. Rings of processes

producer-consumer problem, critical sections, critical section problem, mutual exclusion, progress, bounded waiting, busy waiting, Peterson's solution, Test-and-Set, Swap, semaphores, bounded buffer with semaphores, monitors, dining philosophers, thread synchronization with mutexes

Using the signal mask, catching and ignoring signals, waiting for signals, interrupted system calls

client-server model, connectionless and connection-oriented, UICI

FCFS, SSTF, SCAN, LOOK, C-SCAN, C-LOOK, bad blocks

partitions, paging, TLB, virtual memory,