VIVA Questions

1. What is an operating system?

An operating system is a program that acts as an intermediary between the user and the
computer hardware. The purpose of an OS is to provide a convenient environment in which
user can execute programs in a convenient and efficient manner.

2. What are the different operating systems?

1. Batched operating systems
2. Multi-programmed operating systems
3. timesharing operating systems
4. Distributed operating systems
5. Real-time operating systems

3.What is a boot-strap program?

Bootstrapping is a technique by which a simple computer program activates a more

complicated system of programs.

4.What is BIOS?

A BIOS is software that is put on computers which allows the user to configure the input and
output of a computer.

5.What are residence monitors?

Early operating systems were called residence monitors.

6.What is dual-mode operation?

In order to protect the operating systems and the system programs from the malfunctioning
programs the two mode operations were evolved: 1. System mode. 2. User mode. Here the
user programs cannot directly interact with the system resources, instead they request the
operating system which checks the request and does the required task for the user programs-
DOS was written for / intel 8088 and has no dual-mode. Pentium provides dual-mode
operation.

7.What are system calls?

System calls provide the interface between a process and the operating system.

8.What is a layered approach and what is its advantage?

Layered approach is a step towards modularizing of the system, in which the operating
system is broken up into a number of layers (or levels), each built on top of lower layer. The
bottom layer is the hard ware and the top most is the user interface.
9.What are a virtual machines and site their advantages?

It is the concept by which an operating system can create an illusion that a process has its
own processor with its own (virtual) memory.

10.What is a process?

A program in execution is called a process.

11.What are the states of a process?

1. New 2. Running 3. Waiting 4. Ready 5. Terminated

12.What are various scheduling queues?

1. Job queue 2. Ready queue 3. Device queue

13.What is a job queue?

When a process enters the system it is placed in the job queue.

14.What is a ready queue?

The processes that are residing in the main memory and are ready and waiting to execute are
kept on a list called the ready queue.

15.What is a device queue?

A list of processes waiting for a particular I/O device is called device queue.

16.What is a long term scheduler?

Long term schedulers are the job schedulers that select processes from the job queue and load
them into memory for execution.

17.What are short term scheduler?

The short term schedulers are the CPU schedulers that select a process form the ready queue
and allocate the CPU to one of them.

18.What is context switching?

Transferring the control from one process to other process requires saving the state of the old
process and loading the saved state for new process.

19. What is Round Robin Algorithm?

Time slices are assigned to each process in equal portions and in circular order, handling all
processes without priority .

20.What is CPU Scheduler?

Selects from among the processes in memory that are ready to execute, and allocates the
CPU to one of them.

21.What is Throughput, Turnaround time, waiting time and Response time?

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.

22.What is starvation and aging?

Starvation: Starvation is a resource management problem where a process does not get the
resources it needs for a long time because the resources are being allocated to other
processes. Aging: Aging is a technique to avoid starvation.

23.What are the functions of operating system?

The operating system controls and coordinates the use of hardware among the different
processes and applications. It provides the various functionalities to the users. The following
are the main job of operating system.

- Resource utilization
- Resource allocation
- Process management
- Memory management
- File management
- I/O management
- Device management

24.What is the basic difference between pre-emptive and non-pre-emptive scheduling.

Pre-emptive scheduling allows interruption of a process while it is executing and taking the
CPU to another process while non-pre-emptive scheduling ensures that a process keeps the
CPU under control until it has completed execution.

25.What are pages?

- Pages are same sized pieces of logical memory of a program. Usually they range from 4 KB
to 16 MB depending on the addressing hardware of the machine.

- Pages improve the overall system performance and reduces requirement of physical storage
as the data is read in 'page' units.
26.Differentiate between logical and physical address.

- Physical addresses are actual addresses used for fetching and storing data in main memory
when the process is under execution.

- Logical addresses are generated by user programs. During process loading, they are
converted by the loader into physical address.

27.What are the different types of scheduling algorithms?

The scheduling algorithms decide which processes in the ready queue are to be allocated to
the CPU for execution. Scheduling algorithms can be broadly classified on the basis of:

- Preemptive algorithms

- Round Robin Scheduling

- Shortest Job First Scheduling (can be both)

- Priority Scheduling (can be both)

- Non-preemptive algorithms

- First Come First Served Scheduling

28. What Is The Basic Function Of Paging?

Paging is a memory management scheme that permits the physical-address space of a
process to be noncontiguous. It avoids the considerable problem of having to fit varied
sized memory chunks onto the backing store.

29.What Is Fragmentation?
Fragmentation is memory wasted. It can be internal if we are dealing with systems that
have fixed-sized allocation units, or external if we are dealing with systems that have
variable-sized allocation units.

30.An Example Of A Process State.

New State – means a process is being created
Running – means instructions are being executed
Waiting – means a process is waiting for certain conditions or events to occur
Ready – means a process is waiting for an instruction from the main processor
Terminate – means a process is done executing