Review Topics
Modified Aug.
19, 2002
You should be familiar with the following
topics from your undergraduate operating systems course and computer
architecture course. This is a minimal set - in practice, I hope your
background is broader than this indicates. The
- Types
of operating systems
- Batch
- Time-shared (interactive)
- Multiprogrammed
- Basics
of computer organization
- CPU, memory
- Buses
- Registers: PC, general purpose, MAR, MBR, etc.
- Instruction execution cycle
- Interrupts
- Purpose
- High-level understanding of interrupt processing
- Classes of interrupts (Sometimes non-I/O
interrupts are called traps or exceptions)
- System call/supervisor call/service call
- Program interrupt (due to error condition)
- Timer or clock interrupt
- I/O interrupt
- Processes
(sometimes called tasks)
- Three-state model: Running, Blocked, Ready
- State transitions
- Process control block (PCB)
- Process
Synchronization
- Mutual exclusion
- Semaphores
- Deadlock: causes and definition
- Process
scheduling
- Round-robin scheduling
- Time slice or quantum
- Priority and/or preemptive scheduling
- Memory
management
- Partitioned memory allocation
- Memory fragmentation
- Virtual memory - high level understanding
- Demand paging and page faults
- Principle of locality
- Caching
- basic concept
- Fundamentals
of I/O processing
- File
system – basic concepts
- Characteristics
of magnetic disks