STUDY GUIDE – CS 490 – TEST 1
GENERAL GUIDELINES:
• Review your notes and the textbook. Use the Power Points as a guideline for what to study, but don’t limit your study to the Power Points alone. Power Points not discussed in class won’t be on the test.
• Check out the summary at the end of each chapter as well as the chapter review questions; some of them are helpful.
• Review homework assignments.
• Learn to prioritize; not every item is of equal importance. For example, understanding concurrency and the need for mutual exclusion is more important than knowing what a mailbox is.
CHAPTER 1 – COMPUTER SYSTEM OVERVIEW
• Know the purpose/function of the Program Counter, Instruction Register, MAR and MBR
• Understand the basic instruction execution cycle, including interrupt check/processing.
• What was the original motivation for mutltiprogramming?
• Four classes of interrupts; interrupt processing
• Be able to describe the memory hierarchy, define hit ratio, and compute average system access time (as on your homework). Know the purpose of cache memory
• How does DMA I/O improve performance in a multiprogrammed computer system?
• State a difference/similarity between a Symmetric MultiProcessor(SMP) and a multicore computer.
CHAPTER 2 – OPERATING SYSTEM OVERVIEW
• Three objectives of an operating system.
• What is an OS kernel?
• Why are the following hardware features (originally introduced to support batch processing) important in multiprogrammed operating systems?
o Memory protection
o Timers
o Privileged instructions
o Interrupts
• Difference between user mode and kernel mode of execution
• Difference between batch multiprocessing and time sharing systems
• Definition of process
• What is the execution context, or state, of a process?
• Be sure you understand the concepts of interleaved and overlapped execution.
CHAPTER 3 – PROCESSES
• How does a process differ from a program?
• What’s the purpose a Process Control Block? (PCB) What are some of its contents?
• Be able to describe the 5-State process model on page 117. Know the meaning of each state and the events that cause a process to transition from one state to another.
• How does the addition of swapping and suspended states modify the 5-state model?
• Explain the role of system calls (supervisor calls) in a typical operating system.
• Mechanisms for interrupting process execution (p. 137) and examples of events that might trigger them.
• Be able to distinguish between a mode switch and a process switch and give an example of an event that would cause each type of switch.
• In UNIX, what is the difference between the user running and kernel running state?
CHAPTER 4 – THREADS
• What is the relation between a process and a thread?
• Be able to give one use for threads in a single-user multiprocessing system.
• Disadvantage of structuring an application as multiple cooperating programs versus a single multithreaded program.
• State the difference between a KLT and a ULT and give advantages and disadvantages of each type of thread.
• In Windows, what is the purpose of the Standby state?
CHAPTER 5 – CONCURRENCY: MUTUAL EXCLUSION AND SYNCHRONIZATION
• Multiprogramming versus multiprocessing
• Table 5.1: understand/be able to define and discuss these terms (except livelock)
• Understand how interleaved or overlapped execution of critical sections can cause data incoherence. See examples on page 201 & 203 which demonstrate the problem on a uniprocessor and a multiprocessor.
• Process Interaction, Table 5.2 (p. 205). Have a general idea of the various degrees of awareness.
• What are some hardware techniques for guaranteeing mutual exclusion? What are their disadvantages?
• What is a semaphore? Be able to state the algorithm for a general counting semaphore and trace its behavior.
• Know how semaphores can be used to guarantee mutual exclusion.
• Understand Figure 5.7 (page 219)
• Be able to state the conditions of the Producer Consumer problem. Understand the solution to the bounded-buffer PC problem with semaphores (page 225). No need to memorize, but know how it works.
• What are the basic characteristics of a monitor? What is a difference between a condition variable and semaphore?
• How does message-based communication differ from other types of process communication such as in the Producer-Consumer problem or the Readers & Writers problem?
• Can messages be used for process synchronization?
• What is the difference between a blocking and a non-blocking message send or receive?
• What is a mailbox, with respect to message passing?
................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.
Related searches
- photosynthesis study guide answers
- genesis study guide pdf
- 6th grade science study guide pdf
- biology 101 study guide printable
- ftce study guide pdf
- placement test study guide free
- pect test study guide pennsylvania
- 11 1 biology study guide answers
- 1 john study guide pdf
- chapter 1 study guide biology
- unit 1 study guide biology
- act test study guide free