OS General Concepts

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22 OS General Concepts Questions And Answers

1⟩ List the Coffmans conditions that lead to a deadlock?

Mutual Exclusion: Only one process may use a critical

resource at a time.

Hold & Wait: A process may be allocated some resources

while waiting for others.

No Pre-emption: No resource can be forcible removed from a

process holding it.

Circular Wait: A closed chain of processes exist such that

each process holds at least one resource needed by another

process in the chain.

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2⟩ Explain Beladys Anomaly?

Belady's anomaly is in context with the page faults occurring in FIFO page replacement policy. It says that on increasing the number of page frames, the no. of page faults do not necessarily decrease, they may also increase. LRU page replacement algorithm is free from Belady's anomaly.

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3⟩ Explain the concept of Reentrancy?

It is a useful, memory-saving technique for multiprogrammed

timesharing systems. A Reentrant Procedure is one in which

multiple users can share a single copy of a program during

the same period. Reentrancy has 2 key aspects: The program

code cannot modify itself, and the local data for each user

process must be stored separately. Thus, the permanent part

is the code, and the temporary part is the pointer back to

the calling program and local variables used by that

program. Each execution instance is called activation. It

executes the code in the permanent part, but has its own

copy of local variables/parameters. The temporary part

associated with each activation is the activation record.

Generally, the activation record is kept on the stack.

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6⟩ Explain Demand paging, page faults, replacement algorithms, thrashing?

demand paging:- not all of a process's virtual address space

needs to be loaded in main memory at any given time. Each

page can be either:

o In memory (physical page frame)

o On disk (backing store)

loading the page into the memory from disk when required is

called as demand paging

page faults:-when a process references a page that is in the

backing store,the page fault occurs

replacement algorithms:-various approaches to replace pages

from disk to memory on occurence of page fault

* Page fetching: when to bring pages into memory.

* Page replacement: which pages to throw out of memory.

Page Replacement

* Once all of memory is in use, will need to throw out

one page each time there is a page fault.

* Random: pick any page at random (works surprisingly well!)

* FIFO: throw out the page that has been in memory longest.

* MIN: The optimal algorithm requires us to predict the

future.

* Least Recently Used (LRU): use the past to predict the

future.

* Strange but true: for some placement policies, such as

FIFO, adding more memory can sometimes cause paging

performance to get worse. This is called "Belady's Anomaly"

after Les Belady, who was the first person to notice it.

* Implementing LRU: need hardware support to keep track

of which pages have been used recently.

o Perfect LRU?

+ Keep a register for each page, store

system clock into that register on each memory reference.

+ To choose page for placement, scan through

all pages to find the one with the oldest clock.

+ Hardware costs would have been prohibitive

in the early days of paging; also, expensive to scan all

pages during replacement.

o In practice nobody implements perfect LRU.

Instead, we settle for an approximation that is efficient.

Just find an old page, not necessarily the oldest.

* Clock algorithm (called second chance algorithm in

Silberschatz et al.): keep reference bit for each page

frame, hardware sets the reference bit whenever a page is

read or written. To choose page for placement:

o Start with FIFO approach: cycle through pages in

order circularly.

o If the next page has been referenced, then don't

replace it; just clear the reference bit and continue to the

next page.

o If the page has not been referenced since the

last time we checked it, then replace that page.

* Dirty bit: one bit for each page frame, set by

hardware whenever the page is modified. If a dirty page is

replaced, it must be written to disk before its page frame

is reused.

* The clock algorithm typically gives additional

preference to dirty pages. For example, if the reference but

for a page is clear, but the dirty bit is set, don't replace

this page now, but clear the dirty bit and start writing the

page to disk.

* Free page pool: some systems keep a small list of

clean pages that are available immediately for replacement.

o During replacement, take the page that has been

in the free pool the longest, then run the replacement

algorithm to add a new page to the free pool.

o Pages in the free pool have their exists bit

off, so any references to those pages cause a page fault

o If a page fault occurs for a page in the free

pool, remove it from the free pool and put it back in

service; much faster than reading from disk.

o Provides an extra opportunity for recovery if we

make a poor page replacement decision.

Usually thrashing refers to two or more processes accessing

a shared resource repeatedly such that serious system

performance degradation occurs because the system is

spending a disproportionate amount of time just accessing

the shared resource. Resource access time may generally be

considered as wasted, since it does not contribute to the

advancement of any process. This is often the case when a

CPU can process more information than can be held in

available RAM; consequently the system spends more time

preparing to execute instructions than actually executing them.

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9⟩ Tell me What are the different tasks of Lexical analysis?

The purpose of the lexical analyzer is to partition the input text, delivering a sequence of comments and basic symbols. Comments are character sequences to be ignored, while basic symbols are character sequences that correspond to terminal symbols of the grammar defining the phrase structure of the input

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10⟩ Differentiate between Complier and Interpreter?

when ever a program is to be compiled the syntax is

necessary and we wont receive the output until a correct

syntax is written

it shows the errors so debugging becomes easier

the best example is C language

where as in interpreter if we miss any syntax it violates

that particular line and goes to the next line

in this case we may or may not get the required output

it does not show any errors even though its violates the syntax

the best example is HTML

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11⟩ Do you know What is cache memory?

Cache memory is very high-speed Memory chips which exist

between the CPU and main memory. It stores (i.e., caches)

memory accesses by the CPU. Cache ram helps to alleviate

the gap between the speed of a CPU's megahertz rating and

the ability of RAM to respond and deliver data. It reduces

the frequency that the CPU must wait for data from the main

memory.

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12⟩ Explain What is DRAM? In which form does it store data?

DRAM is the Hershey's chocolate of readable/writable memory:

it's not the best, but it's cheap, does the job, and is

available almost everywhere you look. DRAM data resides in a

cell made of a capacitor and a transistor. The capacitor

tends to lose data unless it's recharged every couple of

milliseconds, and this recharging tends to slow down the

performance of DRAM compared to speedier RAM types.

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13⟩ Explain What is the difference between Authoritative restore & Non-Authoritative restore?

A nonauthoritative restore is the default method for

restoring Active Directory. To perform a nonauthoritative

restore, you must be able to start the domain controller in

Directory Services Restore Mode. After you restore the

domain controller from backup, replication partners use the

standard replication protocols to update Active Directory

and associated information on the restored domain

controller.

An authoritative restore brings a domain or a container back

to the state it was in at the time of backup and overwrites

all changes made since the backup. If you do not want to

replicate the changes that have been made subsequent to the

last backup operation, you must perform an authoritative

restore. In this one needs to stop the inbound replication

first before performing the An authoritative restore.

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15⟩ What is batch programming in DOS?

Batch programming is creating a file with DOS commands which will execute

with a single click even if it comprises of thousands of DOS commands. It's much faster than manual execution of commands. And saves the effort of retyping the same commands over and over again if you're doing a repetitive job with a fixed set of commands. You can rather type those commands down in notepad, save the file as filename.bat as an "all files" type of file. For example if there are a set of services to start on 100 systems, it's a waste of time going to each system, and starting all the services manually. You can type down commands to start those services, save it as a batch file, and run this batch file on all the systems.

All the services will start with just a click.

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18⟩ What is virtual memory?How we can increase or decrease the virtual memory?

Virtual memory are a part of operating sysytem in which

whenever ram have no space to execute any process than

operating system uses some part of hard disk as a ram.

Those part of memory known as virtual memory because this

is virtually created by operating system whenever needed.

This memory created by operating system in big companies in

which more process executes and ram have no space because

they contain more process already. Most operating systems

contains this concept.

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20⟩ How to install operating system through USB pen drive?

For creating a bootable USB drive with Windows 2000 or XP

installer we are going to use a utility called

WinSetupFromUSB. Download it from MSFN forums and install

it. You are going to need the Windows 2000/XP installation

disk. If you have an ISO, extract the iso. Enter the path to

Windows 200/XP installer as Source. After this, plugin in

your USB device and format it. You can use the PEtoUSB tool

to format USB drives smaller than 2GB as FAT16 drive.

However I would recommend using HP Format Tool to format

drives as FAT32 or NTFS (recommended). That is all you need

to do to create a basic installer for Windows 2000 and

Windows XP on your pen drive (USB device). Don’t bother

yourself with any of the other settings. Click on GO to

begin the process. WinSetupFromUSB is a fairly advanced tool

and allows to you create multiboot pen drives that can have

Windows Vista, Windows 7 and even Linux installers. If you

want to know more about this utility just read through the

thread at MSFN forums.

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