B3.4-R3: OPERATING SYSTEMS NOTE: 1. 2. Answer question 1 and any FOUR questions from 2 to 7.

Parts of the same question should be answered together and in the same sequence. Total Marks: 100

Time: 3 Hours 1. a) b) c) d) e) f) g)

What is the purpose of system calls? What are the major activities of an operating system with regard to process management, memory management and secondarystorage management? State advantages and disadvantages of placing functionality in a device controller, rather than the kernel. Why is it important to scale up system bus and device speeds as the CPU speed increases? How could a system be designed to allow a choice of operating systems to boot from? What would the bootstrap program need to do? Assume that a distributed system is susceptible to server failure. What mechanisms would be required to guarantee the exactly once semantics for execution of RPCs? Consider a system that supports the strategies of contiguous, linked and indexed allocation. What criteria should be used to decide which strategy is best utilized for a particular file? Suppose that you have coded the deadlock-avoidance safety algorithm and now have been asked to implement the deadlock-detection algorithm. Can you do so by simply using the safety algorithm code and redefining Maxi = Waitingi + Allocationi, where Waitingi is a vector specifying the resources for which the process i is waiting for, and Allocationi is the resources allocated to the process i. Justify the answer. (7x4) List five services provided by an operating system. Explain how each service provides convenience to the users. Also, explain in which cases it would be possible for user-level programs to provide these services. Which of the following programming techniques and structures are good and not good for a demand-paged environment? Justify your answer. i) Stack ii) Hashed symbol table iii) Sequential search iv) Pure code v) Vector operations vi) Indirection What is the difference between logical and physical address? Answer the following by considering a logical address space of eight pages of 1024 words each, mapped onto a physical memory of 32 frames. i) How many bits are there in the logical address? ii) How many bits are there in the physical address? (8+6+4)

2. a) b)

c)

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3. a)

b) c) 4. a) b) c)

An operating system supports a paged virtual memory, using a central processor with a cycle time of 1 microsecond. It costs an additional 1 microsecond to access a page other than the current one. Pages have 1000 words, and the paging device is a drum that rotates at 3000 revolutions per minute and transfers 1 million words per second. The following statistical measurements were obtained from the system: * 1 percent of all instructions executed accessed a page other than the current page. * Of the instructions that accessed another page, 80 percent accessed a page already in memory. * When a new page was required, the replaced page was modified 50 percent of the time. Calculate the effective instruction time on this system, assuming that the system is running one process only and that the processor is idle during drum transfers. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of caching name translations for computers located in remote domains. Define deadlock? How do we tackle deadlocks? (8+6+4)

What are the goals and principle of protection? Explain, what is access matrix and how protection domains combined with an access matrix are used to specify the resources a process may access. What are the two differences between user-level threads and kernel-level threads? Under what circumstances is one type better than the other? What resources are used when a thread is created? How does DMA increase system concurrency? How does it complicate hardware design? (10+4+4) Suppose that the following processes arrive for execution at the time indicated therein. Each process will run the listed amount of time. In answering the questions, use non preemptive mechanism and base all decisions on the information you have at the time the decision must be made. Process P1 P2 P3 i) Arrival Time 0.0 0.4 1.0 Burst Time 8 4 1

5. a)

What is the average turnaround time for these processes under the FCFS scheduling algorithm? ii) What is the average turnaround time for these processes under the SJF scheduling algorithm? Please note that processes P1 and P2 are waiting during this idle time, so their waiting time may increase.

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b)

c) 6. a) b)

Assume an operating system maps user-level threads to the kernel using the many-to-many model and the mapping is done through Lightweight Processes. Furthermore, the system allows developers to create real-time threads. Is it necessary to bind a real-time thread to a LWP? Explain your answer. List the design goals of Windows XP. Describe any two in detail. (6+6+6) Define the difference between preemptive and non preemptive scheduling. What advantage is there in having different time-quantum sizes on different levels of a multilevel queuing system? Which of the following instructions should be privileged at the user-level? i) Set value of timer ii) Read the clock iii) Clear memory iv) Turn off interrupts v) Modify entries in device-status table Segmentation is similar to paging but uses variable-sized pages. Define any two segment-replacement algorithms based on FIFO and LRU page replacement schemes respectively. Remember that since segments are not of the same size, the segment that is chosen to be replaced may not be big enough to leave enough consecutive locations for the needed segment. Consider strategies for systems, where segments cannot be relocated and for those where it can be relocated. (5+5+8) Show with example that some schedules are possible under the two-phase locking protocol but not possible under the timestamp protocol, and vice versa. The Linux kernel does not allow paging out of kernel memory. What effect does this restriction have on the kernels design? Mention any two advantages and two disadvantages of this design? Explain the purpose of the checkpoint mechanism. How often should checkpoints be performed? Describe how the frequency of checkpoints affects: i) System performance when no failure occurs ii) The time it takes to recover from a system crash iii) The time it takes to recover from a disk crash (5+7+6)

c)

7. a) b) c)

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