OS Interview Questions-7

1. What is Context Switch?
Ans : Switching the CPU to another process requires saving the state of the old process and loading the saved state for the new process. This task is known as a context switch.Context-switch time is pure overhead, because the system does no useful work while switching. Its speed varies from machine to machine, depending on the memory speed, the number of registers which must be copied, the existed of special instructions(such as a single instruction to load or store all registers).

2. Distributed Systems?
Ans : Distribute the computation among several physical processors.
Loosely coupled system – each processor has its own local memory; processors communicate with one another through various communications lines, such as high-speed buses or telephone lines
Advantages of distributed systems:
->Resources Sharing
->Computation speed up – load sharing
->Reliability
->Communications

3.Difference between Primary storage and secondary storage?
Ans :
Main memory: – only large storage media that the CPU can access directly.
Secondary storage: – extension of main memory that provides large nonvolatile storage capacity.

4. What is CPU Scheduler?
Ans :
->Selects from among the processes in memory that are ready to execute, and allocates the CPU to one of them.
->CPU scheduling decisions may take place when a process:
1.Switches from running to waiting state.
2.Switches from running to ready state.
3.Switches from waiting to ready.
4.Terminates.
->Scheduling under 1 and 4 is nonpreemptive.
->All other scheduling is preemptive.

5. What do you mean by deadlock?
Ans : Deadlock is a situation where a group of processes are all blocked and none of them can become unblocked until one of the other becomes unblocked.The simplest deadlock is two processes each of which is waiting for a message from the other

6. What is Dispatcher?
Ans :
->Dispatcher module gives control of the CPU to the process selected by the short-term scheduler; this involves:
- Switching context
- Switching to user mode
- Jumping to the proper location in the user program to restart that program
- Dispatch latency – time it takes for the dispatcher to stop one process and start another running.

7. What is Throughput, Turnaround time, waiting time and Response time?
Ans :
Throughput – number of processes that complete their execution per time unit
Turnaround time – amount of time to execute a particular process
Waiting time – amount of time a process has been waiting in the ready queue
Response time – amount of time it takes from when a request was submitted until the first response is produced, not output (for time-sharing environment)

8. Explain the difference between micro-kernel and macro kernel?
Ans :Micro-Kernel: A micro-kernel is a minimal operating system that performs only the essential functions of an operating system. All other operating system functions are performed by system processes.
Monolithic: A monolithic operating system is one where all operating system code is in a single executable image and all operating system code runs in system mode.

9.What is multi tasking, multi programming, multi threading?
Ans :
Multi programming: Multiprogramming is the technique of running several programs at a time using timesharing.It allows a computer to do several things at the same time. Multiprogramming creates logical parallelism.
The concept of multiprogramming is that the operating system keeps several jobs in memory simultaneously. The operating system selects a job from the job pool and starts executing a job, when that job needs to wait for any i/o operations the CPU is switched to another job. So the main idea here is that the CPU is never idle.

Multi tasking: Multitasking is the logical extension of multiprogramming .The concept of multitasking is quite similar to multiprogramming but difference is that the switching between jobs occurs so frequently that the users can interact with each program while it is running. This concept is also known as time-sharing systems. A time-shared operating system uses CPU scheduling and multiprogramming to provide each user with a small portion of time-shared system.
Multi threading: An application typically is implemented as a separate process with several threads of control. In some situations a single application may be required to perform several similar tasks for example a web server accepts client requests for web pages, images, sound, and so forth. A busy web server may have several of clients concurrently accessing it. If the web server ran as a traditional single-threaded process, it would be able to service only one client at a time. The amount of time that a client might have to wait for its request to be serviced could be enormous.
So it is efficient to have one process that contains multiple threads to serve the same purpose. This approach would multithread the web-server process, the server would create a separate thread that would listen for client requests when a request was made rather than creating another process it would create another thread to service the request.
So to get the advantages like responsiveness, Resource sharing economy and utilization of multiprocessor architectures multithreading concept can be used

10. Give a non-computer example of preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling?
Ans : Consider any system where people use some kind of resources and compete for them. The non-computer examples for preemptive scheduling the traffic on the single lane road if there is emergency or there is an ambulance on the road the other vehicles give path to the vehicles that are in need. The example for preemptive scheduling is people standing in queue for tickets.