Question Bank

Unit -1

1. What is an operating system?

2. Explain different types of operating system?
3. What is the difference between multiprogramming, multiprocessor and Multithreading operating system?
4. Describe the difference between symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing. What are advantages and
disadvantages of multiprocessor systems?
5. What is user and system view of operating system?
6. What is system call. Explain different system calls?
7. Explain the various hardware requirements for modern operating system?
8. List and explain various services provided
9. by operating system?
10. Explain different types of kernel.
11. Enlist and explain different events in OS?
12. Differentiate between Application software & system software?
Unit-2

1. Describe an encryption method provided in Unix to secure files. How does one
2. retrieve an encrypted file using an encryption command? Explain the basic
3. principle.
4. Describe briefly
a. The methods of file accessing.
b. Two level directory structure.
5. What is the role of an inode?
6. Describe the structure of Inode in UNIX. What entries undergo changes when a
7. file is opened to read / write / copied / renamed.
8. What is an I-node and what role does it play.
9. What corresponds to i-node in the MS environment?
10. What is a root file system?
11. List the various disk space allocation strategies. Explain clearly the contiguous
12. allocation technique.
13. Compare and contrast chained allocation with indexed allocation technique of file
14. allocation
15. Define external and internal fragmentation
16. What are the different types of files? What are the tasks of the file management
17. system? List some (at least two) file system related commands in UNIX? How
18. does OS ensure security in file system?

19. What is disk scheduling?

20. How to choose among the various algorithms for disk scheduling?
21. Explain:
i. FCFS disk scheduling
ii. SSTF disk scheduling
 iii. SCAN disk scheduling
iv. CSCAN disk scheduling
For the queue: 98,183,37,122,14,124,65,67 if head starts from 53.

Unit-3

1. What is the difference between a program and a process?

2. What is CPU utilization?

3. What is the motivation for
a. Multi-programming and
b. Time sharing.
4. What is “response time”?
5. With the help of a state transition diagram, explain various states of a process.
6. Explain the difference between busy waiting and blocking.
7. Explain the role of a Process control block (PCB).
8. Show the changes in the process control Block(PCB) when
a. A new process is created and
b. A running process is suspended.
9. What is the use of a process control block? Discuss the changes in the PCB chains
10. when
a. A process makes an I/O request
b. A process completes an I/O Operation.
11. With the help of block diagrams, explain the flow of control between two
12. processes during process switching.
13. What happens when process context is switched? Is it an over-head?
14. Explain the function of the system calls along with the process state diagrams.
15. Compare preemptive and non preemptive scheduling methods and explain in
16. -details the priority based scheduling technique.
17. Explain why real-time systems require a pre-emptive scheduling policy.
18. In a dynamic situation how is the next burst of processing time estimated?
19. Explain the concepts of multitasking.
20. What are the motivations for short term, medium term and long term scheduling
21. levels? Explain with block schematics.
22. Compare and contrast the round-robin, pre-emptive policy with shortest job first
23. pre-emptive policy.
24. Define throughput and turn around time.
25. Explain starvation. When and how starvation may occur?
26. Typically what is the process information Unix OS maintains?
27. Explain the procedure to kill a process.

28. What is CPU scheduling?

29. What are CPU schedulers?
30. Explain the difference between preemptive and non- preemptive scheduling. Explain it with the help of
example.
31. What are the different criteria’s that can be used to judge the performance of any CPU scheduling
algorithms?
32. Explain different categories of CPU scheduling algorithms?
33. What is convoy effect?
34. Consider the following set of processes with the length of CPU Burst given in millisecond:
P1: 24, P2: 3, P3: 3
 Construct gantt chart and calculate the average waiting and response time.
35. What is priority scheduling?
36. What is concept of starvation and how is it removed?
37. How priorities are assigned to the various processes?
38. Apply Round Robin technique to the following processes with CPU burst having time quantum 2:
P1: 6, P2: 3 and P3:6.
39. Discuss the effect of time quantum on the performance of Round robin scheme.
40. What is multilevel queue scheduling?
41. How algorithms are evaluated?
42. What is queue modelling?

Unit-4

1. What is memory?
2. What is memory management?
3. What are the different ways of address binding?
4. Explain dynamic binding and linking.
5. What is swapping? Explain the concept of swapping with example.
6. What is fragmentation and its types?
7. Explain the concept of paging with hardware support?
8. What are shared pages?
9. Why the page size is typically in power of 2?
10. Explain the structure of page tables.
11. What is segmentation?
12. How paging and segmentation are associated?
13. What is virtual memory?
14. Explain the concept of demand paging.
15. Explain “performance of demand paging”.
16. Explain the following:
i. Optimal page replacement algorithm
ii. LRU page replacement algorithm
iii. FIFO page replacement algorithm
17. What is thrashing? Explain the concept of thrashing.

Unit-5

1. What is critical section?

2. What is a semaphore? 
3. A counting semaphore was initialized to 10. Then 6 P (wait) operations and 4V (signal) operations were
completed on this semaphore. What is the resulting value of the semaphore ?
4. What is distributed operating system?
5. What are the advantages of distributed operating system?
6. Explain the different types of distributed operating system.
7. Explain Network operating system.
8. What are multiprocessor systems?
9. What are the advantages of using multiprocessor system?
10. What is the difference between distributed and multiprocessor systems?
Unit-6

1. What is deadlock?
2. What are the necessary conditions for deadlock?
3. What is resource allocation graph (RAG)?
4. What are the various approaches for deadlock handling?
5. How deadlock is prevented?
6. What is safety algorithm?
7. What is deadlock detection?
8. Write the detection algorithm to find deadlocks when there are multiple instances of resource type.
9. How deadlock is recovered?
10. What are the conditions to be satisfied for critical section problem?
11. What is the difference between semaphores and monitors?
12. How semaphores are implemented?
13. What are threads?
14. What is multithreading and its models?
15. Explain banker’s algorithm in detail.

Prepared By HOD, CSE