Import Settings:

Base Settings: Brownstone Default

Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 1

Multiple Choice

1. In what way is an operating system like a government?

A) It seldom functions correctly.
B) It creates an environment within which other programs can do useful work.
C) It performs most useful functions by itself.
D) It is always concerned primarily with the individual's needs.

Ans: B
Section 1.1
Difficulty: Easy

2. ____ operating systems are designed primarily to maximize resource utilization.

A) PC
B) Handheld computer
C) Mainframe
D) Network

Ans: C
Feedback: 1.1.1
Difficulty: Easy

3. The most common secondary storage device is ____.

A) random access memory
B) solid state disks
C) tape drives
D) magnetic disk

Ans: D
Feedback: 1.2.2
Difficulty: Easy

4. Which of the following would lead you to believe that a given system is an SMP-type
system?
A) Each processor is assigned a specific task.
B) There is a boss–worker relationship between the processors.
C) Each processor performs all tasks within the operating system.
D) None of the above

Ans: C
Feedback: 1.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

5. A ____ can be used to prevent a user program from never returning control to the operating
system.
A) portal
B) program counter
C) firewall
D) timer

Ans: D
Feedback: 1.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

6. Embedded computers typically run on a ____ operating system.

A) real-time
B) Windows XP
C) network
D) clustered

Ans: A
Feedback: 1.11.8
Difficulty: Medium

7. Bluetooth and 802.11 devices use wireless technology to communicate over several feet, in
essence creating a ____.
A) local-area network
B) wide-area network
C) small-area network
D) metropolitan-area network

Ans: C
Feedback: 1.11.3
Difficulty: Easy

8. A clustered system ____.

A) gathers together multiple CPUs to accomplish computational work
B) is an operating system that provides file sharing across a network
C) is used when rigid time requirements are present
D) can only operate one application at a time

Ans: A
Feedback: 1.3.3
Difficulty: Easy

9. Which of the following is a property of peer-to-peer systems?

A) Clients and servers are not distinguished from one another.
B) Separate machines act as either the client of the server but not both.
C) They do not offer any advantages over traditional client-server systems.
D) They suffer from the server acting as the bottleneck in performance.

Ans: A
Feedback: 1.11.5
Difficulty: Easy

10. Two important design issues for cache memory are ____.
A) speed and volatility
B) size and replacement policy
C) power consumption and reusability
D) size and access privileges

Ans: B
Feedback: 1.8.3
Difficulty: Medium
11. What are some other terms for kernel mode?
A) supervisor mode
B) system mode
C) privileged mode
D) All of the above

Ans: D
Feedback: 1.5.1
Difficulty: Easy

12. Which of the following statements concerning open source operating systems is true?
A) Solaris is open source.
B) Source code is freely available.
C) They are always more secure than commercial, closed systems.
D) All open source operating systems share the same set of goals.

Ans: B
Feedback: 1.12
Difficulty: Medium

13. Which of the following operating systems is not open source?

A) Windows
B) BSD UNIX
C) Linux
D) PCLinuxOS

Ans: A
Feedback: 1.12
Difficulty: Medium

14. A _____ provides a file-system interface which allows clients to create and modify files.
A) compute-server system
B) file-server system
C) wireless network
D) network computer

Ans: B
Difficulty: Easy
Feedback: 1.11.4
15. A ____ is a custom build of the Linux operating system
A) LiveCD
B) installation
C) distribution
D) VMWare Player

Ans: C
Difficulty: Easy
Feedback: 1.12.2

16. __________ is a set of software frameworks that provide additional services to application
developers.
A) System programs
B) Virtualization
C) Cloud computing
D) Middleware

Ans: D
Difficulty: Medium
Feedback: 1.1.3

17. What statement concerning privileged instructions is considered false?

A) They may cause harm to the system.
B) They can only be executed in kernel mode.
C) They cannot be attempted from user mode.
D) They are used to manage interrupts.

Ans: C
Difficulty: Hard
Feedback: 1.5.1

18. Which of the following statements is false?

A) Mobile devices must be concerned with power consumption.
B) Mobile devices can provide features that are unavailable on desktop or laptop computers.
C) The difference in storage capacity between a mobile device and laptop is shrinking.
D) Mobile devices usually have fewer processing cores than a standard desktop computer.

Ans: C
Difficulty: Medium
Feedback:1.11.2

19. A(n) ________ is the unit of work in a system.

A) process
B) operating system
C) timer
D) mode bit

Ans: A
Difficulty:Medium
Feedback:1.6

20. The two separate modes of operating in a system are

A) supervisor mode and system mode
B) kernel mode and privileged mode
C) physical mode and logical mode
D) user mode and kernel mode

Ans: D
Difficulty:Medium
Feedback: 1.5.1

Essay

21. Explain why an operating system can be viewed as a resource allocator.

Ans: A computer system has many resources that may be required to solve a problem: CPU
time, memory space, file-storage space, I/O devices, and so on. The operating system acts as the
manager of these resources. Facing numerous and possibly conflicting requests for resources,
the operating system must decide how to allocate them to specific programs and users so that it
can operate the computer system efficiently and fairly.
Feedback: 1.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

22. Explain the purpose of an interrupt vector.

Ans: The interrupt vector is merely a table of pointers to specific interrupt-handling routines.
Because there are a fixed number of interrupts, this table allows for more efficient handling of
the interrupts than with a general-purpose, interrupt-processing routine.
Feedback: 1.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

23. What is a bootstrap program, and where is it stored?

Ans: A bootstrap program is the initial program that the computer runs when it is powered up or
rebooted. It initializes all aspects of the system, from CPU registers to device controllers to
memory contents. Typically, it is stored in read-only memory (ROM) or electrically erasable
programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), known by the general term firmware, within the
computer hardware.
Feedback: 1.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

24. What role do device controllers and device drivers play in a computer system?

Ans: A general-purpose computer system consists of CPUs and multiple device controllers that
are connected through a common bus. Each device controller is in charge of a specific type of
device. The device controller is responsible for moving the data between the peripheral devices
that it controls and its local buffer storage. Typically, operating systems have a device driver for
each device controller. This device driver understands the device controller and presents a
uniform interface for the device to the rest of the operating system.
Feedback: 1.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

25. Why are clustered systems considered to provide high-availability service?

Ans: Clustered systems are considered high-availability in that these types of systems have
redundancies capable of taking over a specific process or task in the case of a failure. The
redundancies are inherent due to the fact that clustered systems are composed of two or more
individual systems coupled together.
Feedback: 1.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

26. Describe the differences between physical, virtual, and logical memory.
Ans: Physical memory is the memory available for machines to execute operations (i.e., cache,
random access memory, etc.). Virtual memory is a method through which programs can be
executed that requires space larger than that available in physical memory by using disk memory
as a backing store for main memory. Logical memory is an abstraction of the computer’s
different types of memory that allows programmers and applications a simplified view of
memory and frees them from concern over memory-storage limitations.
Feedback: 1.4
Difficulty: Medium

27. Describe the operating system's two modes of operation.

Ans: In order to ensure the proper execution of the operating system, most computer systems
provide hardware support to distinguish between user mode and kernel mode. A mode bit is
added to the hardware of the computer to indicate the current mode: kernel (0) or user (1).
When the computer system is executing on behalf of a user application, the system is in user
mode. However, when a user application requests a service from the operating system (via a
system call), it must transition from user to kernel mode to fulfill the request.
Feedback: 1.5.1
Difficulty: Medium

28. Explain cache coherency.

Ans: In multiprocessor environments, two copies of the same data may reside in the local cache
of each CPU. Whenever one CPU alters the data, the cache of the other CPU must receive an
updated version of this data. Cache coherency involves ensuring that multiple caches store the
most updated version of the stored data.
Feedback: 1.8.3
Difficulty: Medium

29. Why is main memory not suitable for permanent program storage or backup purposes?
Furthermore, what is the main disadvantage to storing information on a magnetic disk drive as
opposed to main memory?

Ans: Main memory is a volatile memory in that any power loss to the system will result in
erasure of the data stored within that memory. While disk drives can store more information
permanently than main memory, disk drives are significantly slower.
Feedback: 1.2
Difficulty: Hard
30. Describe the compute-server and file-server types of server systems.

Ans: The compute-server system provides an interface to which a client can send a request to
perform an action (for example, read data from a database); in response, the server executes the
action and sends back results to the client. The file-server system provides a file-system interface
where clients can create, update, read, and delete files. An example of such a system is a Web
server that delivers files to clients running Web browsers.
Feedback: 1.11.4
Difficulty: Medium

31. Computer systems can be divided into four approximate components. What are they?

Ans: Hardware, operating system, application programs, and users.

Feedback: 1.1
Difficulty: Easy

32. Distinguish between system and application programs.

Ans: System programs are not part of the kernel, but still are associated with the operating
system. Application programs are not associated with the operating of the system.
Feedback: 1.1.3
Difficulty: Easy

33. Describe why direct memory access (DMA) is considered an efficient mechanism for
performing I/O.

Ans: DMA is efficient for moving large amounts of data between I/O devices and main memory.
It is considered efficient because it removes the CPU from being responsible for transferring data.
DMA instructs the device controller to move data between the devices and main memory.
Feedback: 1.2.3
Difficulty: Medium

34. Describe why multi-core processing is more efficient than placing each processor on its own
chip.

Ans: A large reason why it is more efficient is that communication between processors on the
same chip is faster than processors on separate chips.
Feedback: 1.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

35. Distinguish between uniform memory access (UMA) and non-uniform memory access
(NUMA) systems.

Ans: On UMA systems, accessing RAM takes the same amount of time from any CPU. On
NUMA systems, accessing some parts of memory may take longer than accessing other parts of
memory, thus creating a performance penalty for certain memory accesses.
Feedback: 1.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

36. Explain the difference between singly, doubly, and circularly linked lists.

Ans: A singly linked list is where each item points to its successor. A doubly linked
linked list allows an item to point to its predecessor or successor. A circularly linked
list is the where the last element points back to the first.
Feedback:1.10.1
Difficulty:Easy

37. What two operating systems currently dominate mobile computing?

Ans: Apple's iOS and Google's Android

Feedback:1.11.2
Difficulty:Easy

38. Explain the difference between protection and security.

Ans: Protection is concerned with controlling the access of processes or users to the resources of
the computer system. The role of security is to defend the system from internal or external
attacks.
Feedback: 1.9
Difficulty: Medium

39. Distinguish mobile computing from traditional desktop computing.

Ans: Mobile computing takes place on handheld devices and tablets. Because these devices are
portable and lightweight, they typically do not have the processing power and storage capacity of
desktop systems. However, features such as GPS and accelerometers have allowed mobile
devices to provide functionality that is unavailable to desktop systems.
Feedback: 1.11.2
Difficulty: Medium

40. Describe cloud computing.

Ans: Cloud computing is a type of computing that delivers computing,storage, and application
services across a network. Cloud computing often uses virtualization to provide its functionality.
There are many different types of cloud environments, as well as services offered. Cloud
computing may be either public, private, or a hybrid of the two. Additionally, cloud computing
may offer applications, platforms, or system infrastructures.
Feedback:1.11.7
Difficulty: Hard

True/False

41. The operating system kernel consists of all system and application programs in a computer.

Ans: False
Feedback: 1.1.3
Difficulty: Easy

42. Flash memory is slower than DRAM but needs no power to retain its contents.

Ans: True
Feedback: 1.2.2
Difficulty: Easy

43. A system call is triggered by hardware.

Ans: False
Feedback: 1.5.1
Difficulty: Easy
44. UNIX does not allow users to escalate privileges to gain extra permissions for a restricted
activity.

Ans: False
Feedback: 1.9
Difficulty: Medium

45. Processors for most mobile devices run at a slower speed than a processor in a desktop PC.

Ans: True
Feedback: 1.11.2
Difficulty: Medium

46. Interrupts may be triggered by either hardware of software

Ans: True
Feedback: 1.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

47. A dual-core system requires each core has its own cache memory.

Ans: False
Feedback: 1.3.2
Difficulty: Easy

48. Virtually all modern operating systems provide support for SMP

Ans: True
Feedback: 1.3.2
Difficulty: Easy

49. All computer systems have some sort of user interaction.

Ans: False
Feedback: 1.1.1
Difficulty:Medium

50. Solid state disks are generally faster than magnetic disks.

Ans: True
Feedback: 1.2.2
Difficulty: Easy

51. Solid state disks are considered volatile storage.

Ans: False
Feedback: 1.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

52. There is no universally accepted definition of an operating system.

Ans:True
Feedback:1.1.3
Difficulty:Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 2

Multiple Choice

1. A _____ is an example of a systems program.

A) command interpreter
B) Web browser
C) text formatter
D) database system

Ans: A
Feedback: 2.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

2. If a program terminates abnormally, a dump of memory may be examined by a ____ to

determine the cause of the problem.
A) module
B) debugger
C) shell
D) control card

Ans: B
Feedback: 2.4.1
Difficulty: Medium

3. A message-passing model is ____.

A) easier to implement than a shared memory model for intercomputer communication
B) faster than the shared memory model
C) a network protocol, and does not apply to operating systems
D) only useful for small simple operating systems
Ans: A
Feedback: 2.4.5
Difficulty: Medium

4. Policy ____.
A) determines how to do something
B) determines what will be done
C) is not likely to change across places
D) is not likely to change over time

Ans: B
Feedback: 2.6.2
Difficulty: Easy

5. The major difficulty in designing a layered operating system approach is ____.

A) appropriately defining the various layers
B) making sure that each layer hides certain data structures, hardware, and operations from
higher-level layers
C) debugging a particular layer
D) making sure each layer is easily converted to modules

Ans: A
Feedback:: 2.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

6. A microkernel is a kernel ____.

A) containing many components that are optimized to reduce resident memory size
B) that is compressed before loading in order to reduce its resident memory size
C) that is compiled to produce the smallest size possible when stored to disk
D) that is stripped of all nonessential components

Ans: D
Feedback: 2.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

7. To the SYSGEN program of an operating system, the least useful piece of information is
_____.
A) the CPU being used
B) amount of memory available
C) what applications to install
D) operating-system options such as buffer sizes or CPU scheduling algorithms

Ans: C
Feedback: 2.9
Difficulty: Medium

8. A boot block ____.

A) typically only knows the location and length of the rest of the bootstrap program
B) typically is sophisticated enough to load the operating system and begin its execution
C) is composed of multiple disk blocks
D) is composed of multiple disk cylinders

Ans: A
Feedback: 2.10
Difficulty: Medium

9. _____ provide(s) an interface to the services provided by an operating system.

A) Shared memory
B) System calls
C) Simulators
D) Communication

Ans: B
Feedback: 2.3
Difficulty: Medium

10. _____ is not one of the major categories of system calls.

A) Process control
B) Communications
C) Protection
D) Security

Ans: D
Feedback: 2.4
Difficulty: Easy
11. _____ allow operating system services to be loaded dynamically.
A) Virtual machines
B) Modules
C) File systems
D) Graphical user interfaces

Ans: B
Feedback: 2.7.4
Difficulty: Medium

12. Microkernels use _____ for communication.

A) message passing
B) shared memory
C) system calls
D) virtualization

Ans: A
Feedback: 2.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

13. The Windows CreateProcess() system call creates a new process. What is the
equivalent system call in UNIX:
A) NTCreateProcess()
B) process()
C) fork()
D) getpid()

Ans: C
Feedback: 2.4.1
Difficulty: Easy

14. The close() system call in UNIX is used to close a file. What is the equivalent system call
in Windows:
A) CloseHandle()
B) close()
C) CloseFile()
D) Exit()

Ans: A
Feedback: 2.4.1
Difficulty: Easy

15. The Windows CreateFile() system call is used to create a file. What is the equivalent
system call in UNIX:
A) ioctl()
B) open()
C) fork()
D) createfile()

Ans: B
Feedback: 2.4.1
Difficulty: Easy

16. Android runs Java programs _____________

A) in the Dalvik virtual machine.
B) natively.
C) in the Java virtual machine.
D) Android does not run Java programs.

Ans: A
Feedback: 2.7.5
Difficulty: Medium

17. ______ is a mobile operating system designed for the iPhone and iPad.
A) Mac OS X
B) Android
C) UNIX
D) iOS

Ans: D
Feedback: 2.7.5
Difficulty: Medium

18. The ________ provides a portion of the system call interface for UNIX and Linux.
A) POSIX
B) Java
C) Standard C library
D) Standard API

Ans: C
Feedback: 2.4.1
Difficulty: Medium

19. Which of the following statements is incorrect?

A) An operating system provides an environment for the execution of programs.
B) An operating system manages system resources.
C) Operating systems provide both command line as well as graphical user interfaces.
D) Operating systems must provide both protection and security.

Ans: C
Feedback: 2.1
Difficulty: Easy

20. _____ is/are not a technique for passing parameters from an application to a system call.
A) Cache memory
B) Registers
C) Stack
D) Special block in memory

Ans: A
Feedback: 2.3
Difficulty: Medium

Essay

21. There are two different ways that commands can be processed by a command interpreter.
One way is to allow the command interpreter to contain the code needed to execute the command.
The other way is to implement the commands through system programs. Compare and contrast
the two approaches.

Ans: In the first approach, upon the user issuing a command, the interpreter jumps to the
appropriate section of code, executes the command, and returns control back to the user. In the
second approach, the interpreter loads the appropriate program into memory along with the
appropriate arguments. The advantage of the first method is speed and overall simplicity. The
disadvantage to this technique is that new commands require rewriting the interpreter program
which, after a number of modifications, may get complicated, messy, or too large. The advantage
to the second method is that new commands can be added without altering the command
interpreter. The disadvantage is reduced speed and the clumsiness of passing parameters from the
interpreter to the system program.
Feedback: 2.2
Difficulty: Hard

22. Describe the relationship between an API, the system-call interface, and the operating
system.

Ans: The system-call interface of a programming language serves as a link to system calls
made available by the operating system. This interface intercepts function calls in the API and
invokes the necessary system call within the operating system. Thus, most of the details of the
operating-system interface are hidden from the programmer by the API and are managed by the
run-time support library.
Feedback: 2.3
Difficulty: Hard

23. Describe three general methods used to pass parameters to the operating system during
system calls.

Ans: The simplest approach is to pass the parameters in registers. In some cases, there may be
more parameters than registers. In these cases, the parameters are generally stored in a block, or
table, of memory, and the address of the block is passed as a parameter in a register. Parameters
can also be placed, or pushed, onto the stack by the program and popped off the stack by the
operating system.
Feedback: 2.3
Difficulty: Medium

24. What are the advantages of using a higher-level language to implement an operating
system?

Ans: The code can be written faster, is more compact, and is easier to understand and debug. In
addition, improvements in compiler technology will improve the generated code for the entire
operating system by simple recompilation. Finally, an operating system is far easier to port — to
move to some other hardware — if it is written in a higher-level language.
Feedback: 2.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

25. Describe some requirements, or goals, when designing an operating system.

Ans: Requirements can be divided into user and system goals. Users desire a system that is
convenient to use, easy to learn, and to use, reliable, safe, and fast. System goals are defined by
those people who must design, create, maintain, and operate the system: The system should be
easy to design, implement, and maintain; it should be flexible, reliable, error-free, and efficient.
Feedback: 2.6.1
Difficulty: Medium

26. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a microkernel approach?

Ans: One benefit of the microkernel approach is ease of extending the operating system. All
new services are added to user space and consequently do not require modification of the kernel.
The microkernel also provides more security and reliability, since most services are running as
user — rather than kernel — processes. Unfortunately, microkernels can suffer from
performance decreases due to increased system function overhead.
Feedback: 2.7.3
Difficulty: Medium

27. Explain why a modular kernel may be the best of the current operating system design
techniques.

Ans: The modular approach combines the benefits of both the layered and microkernel design
techniques. In a modular design, the kernel needs only to have the capability to perform the
required functions and know how to communicate between modules. However, if more
functionality is required in the kernel, then the user can dynamically load modules into the kernel.
The kernel can have sections with well-defined, protected interfaces, a desirable property found
in layered systems. More flexibility can be achieved by allowing the modules to communicate
with one another.
Feedback: 2.7.4
Difficulty: Hard

28. Describe how Mac OS X is considered a hybrid system.

Ans: Primarily because he kernel environment is a blend of the Mach microkernel and BSD
UNIX (which is closer to a monolithic kernel.)
Feedback: 2.7.5
Difficulty: Medium

29. Describe how Android uses a unique virtual machine for running Java programs.

Ans: The Dalvik virtual machine is designed specifically for Android and has been optimized for
mobile devices with limited memory and CPU processing capabilities.
Feedback: 2.7.5
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

30. KDE and GNOME desktops are available under open-source licenses.

Ans: True
Feedback: 2.2.2
Difficulty: Easy

31. Many operating system merge I/O devices and files into a combined file because of the
similarity of system calls for each.

Ans: True
Feedback: 2.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

32. An initial bootstrap program is in the form of random-access memory (RAM).

Ans: False
Feedback: 2.11
Difficulty: Easy

33. System calls can be run in either user mode or kernel mode.
Ans: False
Feedback: 2.3
Difficulty: Easy

34. Application programmers typically use an API rather than directory invoking system calls.

Ans: True
Feedback: 2.3
Difficulty: Easy

35. In general, Windows system calls have longer, more descriptive names and UNIX system
calls use shorter, less descriptive names.

Ans: True
Feedback: 2.4
Difficulty: Easy

36. Mac OS X is a hybrid system consisting of both the Mach microkernel and BSD UNIX.

Ans: True
Feedback: 2.7.5
Difficulty: Medium

37. iOS is open source, Android is closed source.

Ans: False
Feedback: 2.7.5
Difficulty: Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 3

Multiple Choice

1. The ____ of a process contains temporary data such as function parameters, return addresses,
and local variables.
A) text section
B) data section
C) program counter
D) stack

Ans: D
Feedback: 3.1.1
Difficulty: Easy

2. A process control block ____.

A) includes information on the process's state
B) stores the address of the next instruction to be processed by a different process
C) determines which process is to be executed next
D) is an example of a process queue

Ans: A
Feedback: 3.1.3
Difficulty: Easy

3. The list of processes waiting for a particular I/O device is called a(n) ____.
A) standby queue
B) device queue
C) ready queue
D) interrupt queue
Ans: B
Feedback: 3.2.1
Difficulty: Easy

4. The _____________ refers to the number of processes in memory.

A) process count
B) long-term scheduler
C) degree of multiprogramming
D) CPU scheduler

Ans: C
Feedback: 3.2.2
Difficulty: Easy

5. When a child process is created, which of the following is a possibility in terms of the
execution or address space of the child process?
A) The child process runs concurrently with the parent.
B) The child process has a new program loaded into it.
C) The child is a duplicate of the parent.
D) All of the above

Ans: D
Feedback: 3.3.1
Difficulty: Easy

6. A _________________ saves the state of the currently running process and restores the state
of the next process to run.
A) save-and-restore
B) state switch
C) context switch
D) none of the above

Ans: C
Feedback: 3.2.3
Difficulty: Easy

7. A process may transition to the Ready state by which of the following actions?
A) Completion of an I/O event
B) Awaiting its turn on the CPU
C) Newly-admitted process
D) All of the above

Ans: D
Feedback: 3.1.2
Difficulty: Easy

8. In a(n) ____ temporary queue, the sender must always block until the recipient receives the
message.
A) zero capacity
B) variable capacity
C) bounded capacity
D) unbounded capacity

Ans: A
Feedback: 3.4.2
Difficulty:Easy

9. A blocking send() and blocking receive() is known as a(n) _________________

A) synchronized message
B) rendezvous
C) blocked message
D) asynchronous message

Ans: B
Feedback: 3.4.2.2
Difficulty:Easy

10 . Which of the following is true in a Mach operating system?

A) All messages have the same priority.
B) Multiple messages from the same sender are guaranteed an absolute ordering.
C) The sending thread must return immediately if a mailbox is full.
D) It is not designed for distributed systems.

Ans: A
Feedback: 3.5.2
Difficulty: Moderate
11. When communicating with sockets, a client process initiates a request for a connection and
is assigned a port by the host computer. Which of the following would be a valid port assignment
for the host computer?
A) 21
B) 23
C) 80
D) 1625

Ans: D
Feedback: 3.6.1
Difficulty: Moderate

12. A(n) ______________ allows several unrelated processes to use the pipe for communication.
A) named pipe
B) anonymous pipe
C) LIFO
D) ordinary pipe

Ans: B
Feedback: 3.6.3.2
Difficulty: Moderate

13. Which of the following statements is true?

A) Shared memory is typically faster than message passing.
B) Message passing is typically faster than shared memory.
C) Message passing is most useful for exchanging large amounts of data.
D) Shared memory is far more common in operating systems than message passing.

Ans:A
Feedback: 3.4
Difficulty: Moderate

14. Imagine that a host with IP address 150.55.66.77 wishes to download a file from the web
server at IP address 202.28.15.123. Select a valid socket pair for a connection between this pair
of hosts.
A) 150.55.66.77:80 and 202.28.15.123:80
B) 150.55.66.77:150 and 202.28.15.123:80
C) 150.55.66.77:2000 and 202.28.15.123:80
D) 150.55.66.77:80 and 202.28.15.123:3500
Ans:C
Feedback: 3.6.1
Difficulty: Moderate

15. Child processes inherit UNIX ordinary pipes from their parent process because:
A) The pipe is part of the code and children inherit code from their parents.
B) A pipe is treated as a file descriptor and child processes inherit open file descriptors from
their parents.
C) The STARTUPINFO structure establishes this sharing.
D) All IPC facilities are shared between the parent and child processes.

Ans:B
Feedback: 3.6.3.1
Difficulty: Moderate

16. Which of the following statements is true?

A) Named pipes do not allow bi-directional communication.
B) Only the parent and child processes can use named pipes for communication.
C) Reading and writing to ordinary pipes on both UNIX and Windows systems can be performed
like ordinary file I/O.
D) Named pipes can only be used by communicating processes on the same machine.

Ans: C
Feedback: 3.6.3
Difficulty: Moderate

17. Which of the following is not a process type in the Chrome browser?
A) Plug-in
B) Renderer
C) Sandbox
D) Browser

Ans: C
Feedback: 3.4
Difficulty: Medium

18. The ________ application is the application appearing on the display screen of a mobile
device.
A) main
B) background
C) display
D) foreground

Ans: D
Feedback: 3.2.3
Difficulty: Easy

19. A process that has terminated, but whose parent has not yet called wait(), is known as a
________ process.
A) zombie
B) orphan
C) terminated
D) init

Ans: A
Feedback: 3.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

20. The _______ process is assigned as the parent to orphan processes.

A) zombie
B) init
C) main
D) renderer

Ans: B
Feedback:
Difficulty: Medium

Short Answer

21. Name and describe the different states that a process can exist in at any given time.

Ans: The possible states of a process are: new, running, waiting, ready, and terminated. The
process is created while in the new state. In the running or waiting state, the process is executing
or waiting for an event to occur, respectively. The ready state occurs when the process is ready
and waiting to be assigned to a processor and should not be confused with the waiting state
mentioned earlier. After the process is finished executing its code, it enters the termination state.
Feedback: 3.1.2
Difficulty: Moderate

22. Explain the main differences between a short-term and long-term scheduler.

Ans: The primary distinction between the two schedulers lies in the frequency of execution.
The short-term scheduler is designed to frequently select a new process for the CPU, at least
once every 100 milliseconds. Because of the short time between executions, the short-term
scheduler must be fast. The long-term scheduler executes much less frequently; minutes may
separate the creation of one new process and the next. The long-term scheduler controls the
degree of multiprogramming. Because of the longer interval between executions, the long-term
scheduler can afford to take more time to decide which process should be selected for execution.
Feedback: 3.2.2
Difficulty: Moderate

23. Explain the difference between an I/O-bound process and a CPU-bound process.

Ans: The differences between the two types of processes stem from the number of I/O requests
that the process generates. An I/O-bound process spends more of its time seeking I/O operations
than doing computational work. The CPU-bound process infrequently requests I/O operations
and spends more of its time performing computational work.
Feedback: 3.2.2
Difficulty: Moderate

24. Explain the concept of a context switch.

Ans: Whenever the CPU starts executing a new process, the old process's state must be
preserved. The context of a process is represented by its process control block. Switching the
CPU to another process requires performing a state save of the current process and a state restore
of a different process. This task is known as a context switch. When a context switch occurs,
the kernel saves the context of the old process in its PCB and loads the saves context of the new
process scheduled to run.
Feedback: 3.2.3
Difficulty: Moderate

25. Explain the fundamental differences between the UNIX fork() and Windows
CreateProcess() functions.

Ans: Each function is used to create a child process. However, fork() has no parameters;
CreateProcess() has ten. Furthermore, whereas the child process created with fork() inherits
a copy of the address space of its parent, the CreateProcess() function requires specifying the
address space of the child process.
Feedback: 3.3.1
Difficulty: Moderate

26. Name the three types of sockets used in Java and the classes that implement them.

Ans: Connection-oriented (TCP) sockets are implemented with the Socket class.
Connectionless (UDP) sockets use the DatagramSocket class. Finally, the MulticastSocket
class is a subclass of the DatagramSocket class. A multicast socket allows data to be sent to
multiple recipients.
Feedback: 3.6.1
Difficulty: Moderate

27. What is a loopback and when is it used?

Ans: A loopback is a special IP address: 127.0.0.1. When a computer refers to IP address

127.0.0.1, it is referring to itself. When using sockets for client/server communication, this
mechanism allows a client and server on the same host to communicate using the TCP/IP
protocol.
Feedback: 3.6.1
Difficulty: Moderate

28. Explain the purpose of external data representation (XDR).

Ans: Data can be represented differently on different machine architectures (e.g., little-endian vs.
big-endian). XDR represents data independently of machine architecture. XDR is used when
transmitting data between different machines using an RPC.
Feedback: 3.6.2
Difficulty: Hard

29. Explain the term marshalling.

Ans: Marshalling involves the packaging of parameters into a form that can be transmitted over
the network. When the client invokes a remote procedure, the RPC system calls the appropriate
stub, passing it the parameters provided to the remote procedure. This stub locates the port on
the server and marshals the parameters. If necessary, return values are passed back to the client
using the same technique.
Feedback: 3.6.2
Difficulty: Moderate

30. Explain the terms "at most once" and "exactly once" and indicate how they relate to remote
procedure calls.

Ans: Because a remote procedure call can fail in any number of ways, it is important to be able
to handle such errors in the messaging system. The term "at most once" refers to ensuring that
the server processes a particular message sent by the client only once and not multiple times.
This is implemented by merely checking the timestamp of the message. The term "exactly once"
refers to making sure that the message is executed on the server once and only once so that there
is a guarantee that the server received and processed the message.
Feedback: 3.6.2
Difficulty: Hard

31. Describe two approaches to the binding of client and server ports during RPC calls.

Ans: First, the binding information may be predetermined, in the form of fixed port addresses.
At compile time, an RPC call has a fixed port number associated with it. Second, binding can
be done dynamically by a rendezvous mechanism. Typically, an operating system provides a
rendezvous daemon on a fixed RPC port. A client then sends a message containing the name of
the RPC to the rendezvous daemon requesting the port address of the RPC it needs to execute.
The port number is returned, and the RPC calls can be sent to that port until the process
terminates (or the server crashes).
Feedback: 3.6.2
Difficulty: Hard

32. Ordinarily the exec() system call follows the fork(). Explain what would happen if a
programmer were to inadvertently place the call to exec() before the call to fork().

Ans: Because exec() overwrites the process, we would never reach the call to fork() and hence,
no new processes would be created. Rather, the program specified in the parameter to exec()
would be run instead.
Feedback: 3.3.1
Difficulty: Moderate
33. Explain why Google Chrome uses multiple processes.

Ans: Each website opens up in a separate tab and is represented with a separate renderer process.
If that webpage were to crash, only the process representing that the tab would be affected, all
other sites (represented as separate tabs/processes) would be unaffected.
Feedback: 3.4
Difficulty: Moderate

34. Describe how UNIX and Linux manage orphan processes.

Ans: If a parent terminates without first calling wait(), its children are considered orphan
processes. Linux and UNIX assign the init process as the new parent of orphan processes and init
periodically calls wait() which allows any resources allocated to terminated processes to be
reclaimed by the operating system.
Feedback: 3.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

35. All processes in UNIX first translate to a zombie process upon termination.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.3.2
Difficulty: Hard

36. The difference between a program and a process is that a program is an active entity while a
process is a passive entity.

Ans: False
Feedback: 3.1.1
Difficulty: Easy

37. The exec() system call creates a new process.

Ans: False
Feedback: 3.3.1
Difficulty: Easy

38. All access to POSIX shared memory requires a system call.

Ans: False
Feedback: 3.5.1
Difficulty: Easy

39. Local Procedure Calls in Windows XP are similar to Remote Procedure Calls.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.5.3
Difficulty: Easy

40. For a single-processor system, there will never be more than one process in the Running
state.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.1.2
Difficulty: Easy

41. Shared memory is a more appropriate IPC mechanism than message passing for distributed
systems.

Ans: False
Feedback: 3.4.2
Difficulty: Easy

42. Ordinary pipes in UNIX require a parent-child relationship between the communicating
processes.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.6.3.1
Difficulty: Easy
43. Ordinary pipes in Windows require a parent-child relationship between the communicating
processes.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.6.3.1
Difficulty: Easy

44. Using a section object to pass messages over a connection port avoids data copying.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.5.3
Difficulty: Moderate

45. A socket is identified by an IP address concatenated with a port number.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.6.1
Difficulty: Easy

46. Sockets are considered a high-level communications scheme.

Ans: False
Feedback: 3.6.1
Difficulty: Moderate

47. The Mach operating system treats system calls with message passing.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.5.2
Difficulty: Moderate

48. Named pipes continue to exist in the system after the creating process has terminated.
Ans:True
Feedback: 3.6.3.2
Difficulty: Easy

49. A new browser process is create by the Chrome browser for every new website that is
visited.

Ans: False
Feedback: 3.4
Difficulty: Medium

50. The iOS mobile operating system only supports a limited form of multitasking.

Ans: True
Feedback: 3.2.3
Difficulty: Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 4

Multiple Choice

1. ____ is a thread library for Solaris that maps many user-level threads to one kernel thread.
A) Pthreads
B) Green threads
C) Sthreads
D) Java threads

Ans: B
Feedback: 4.3.1
Difficulty: Medium

2. Pthreads refers to ____.

A) the POSIX standard.
B) an implementation for thread behavior.
C) a specification for thread behavior.
D) an API for process creation and synchronization.

Ans: C
Feedback: 4.4.1
Difficulty: Medium

3. The ____ multithreading model multiplexes many user-level threads to a smaller or equal
number of kernel threads.
A) many-to-one model
B) one-to-one model
C) many-to-many model
D) many-to-some model
Ans: C
Feedback: 4.3.3
Difficulty: Easy

4. Cancellation points are associated with ____ cancellation.

A) asynchronous
B) deferred
C) synchronous
D) non-deferred

Ans: B
Feedback: 4.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

5. Which of the following would be an acceptable signal handling scheme for a multithreaded
program?
A) Deliver the signal to the thread to which the signal applies.
B) Deliver the signal to every thread in the process.
C) Deliver the signal to only certain threads in the process.
D) All of the above

Ans: D
Feedback: 4.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

6. Signals can be emulated in windows through ____.

A) asynchronous procedure calls
B) local procedure calls
C) remote procedure calls
D) none of the above

Ans: A
Feedback: 4.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

7. Thread-local storage is data that ____.

A) is not associated with any process
B) has been modified by the thread, but not yet updated to the parent process
C) is generated by the thread independent of the thread's process
D) is unique to each thread

Ans: D
Feedback: 4.6.4
Difficulty: Medium

8. LWP is ____.
A) short for lightweight processor
B) placed between system and kernel threads
C) placed between user and kernel threads
D) common in systems implementing one-to-one multithreading models

Ans: C
Feedback: 4.6.5
Difficulty: Easy

9. Windows uses the ____.

A) one-to-one model
B) many-to-one model
C) one-to many-model
D) many-to-many model

Ans: A
Feedback: 4.7.1
Difficulty: Easy

10. In multithreaded programs, the kernel informs an application about certain events using a
procedure known as a(n) ____.
A) signal
B) upcall
C) event handler
D) pool

Ans: B
Feedback: 4.6.5
Difficulty: Medium
11. _____ is not considered a challenge when designing applications for multicore systems.
A) Deciding which activities can be run in parallel
B) Ensuring there is a sufficient number of cores
C) Determining if data can be separated so that it is accessed on separate cores
D) Identifying data dependencies between tasks.

Ans: B
Feedback: 4.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

12. A ____ provides an API for creating and managing threads.

A) set of system calls
B) multicore system
C) thread library
D) multithreading model

Ans: C
Feedback: 4.4
Difficulty: Easy

13. The _____ model multiplexes many user-level threads to a smaller or equal number of kernel
threads.
A) many-to-many
B) two-level
C) one-to-one
D) many-to-one

Ans: A
Feedback: 4.3.3
Difficulty: Easy

14. The _____ model maps many user-level threads to one kernel thread.
A) many-to-many
B) two-level
C) one-to-one
D) many-to-one

Ans: D
Feedback: 4.3.1
Difficulty: Easy
15. The _____ model maps each user-level thread to one kernel thread.
A) many-to-many
B) two-level
C) one-to-one
D) many-to-one

Ans: C
Feedback: 4.3.2
Difficulty: Easy

16. The _____ model allows a user-level thread to be bound to one kernel thread.
A) many-to-many
B) two-level
C) one-to-one
D) many-to-one

Ans: B
Feedback: 4.3.3
Difficulty: Easy

17. The most common technique for writing multithreaded Java programs is _____.
A) extending the Thread class and overriding the run() method
B) implementing the Runnable interface and defining its run() method
C) designing your own Thread class
D) using the CreateThread() function

Ans: B
Feedback: 4.4.3
Difficulty: Easy

18. In Pthreads, a parent uses the pthread_join() function to wait for its child thread to
complete. What is the equivalent function in Win32?
A) win32_join()
B) wait()
C) WaitForSingleObject()
D) join()
Ans: C
Section 4.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

19. Which of the following statements regarding threads is false?

A) Sharing is automatically provided in Java threads.
B) Both Pthreads and Win32 threads share global data.
C) The start() method actually creates a thread in the Java virtual machine.
D) The Java method join() provides similar functionality as the WaitForSingleObject in
Win32.

Ans: A
Feedback: 4.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

20. A _____ uses an existing thread — rather than creating a new one — to complete a task.
A) lightweight process
B) thread pool
C) scheduler activation
D) asynchronous procedure call

Ans: B
Feedback: 4.5.1
Difficulty: Easy

21. According to Amdahl's Law, what is the speedup gain for an application that is 60% parallel
and we run it on a machine with 4 processing cores?
A) 1.82
B) .7
C) .55
D) 1.43

Ans: D
Feedback: 4.2
Difficulty: Medium

22. _________ involves distributing tasks across multiple computing cores.

A) Concurrency
B) Task parallelism
C) Data parallelism
D) Parallelism

Ans: B
Feedback: 4.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

23. ___________ is a formula that identifies potential performance gains from adding additional
computing cores to an application that has a parallel and serial component.
A) Task parallelism
B) Data parallelism
C) Data splitting
D) Amdahl's Law

Ans: D
Feedback: 4.2
Difficulty: Medium

24. When OpenMP encounters the #pragma omp parallel directive, it

A) constructs a parallel region
B) creates a new thread
C) creates as many threads as there are processing cores
D) parallelizes for loops

Ans: C
Feedback: 4.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

25. Grand Central Dispatch handles blocks by

A) placing them on a dispatch queue
B) creating a new thread
C) placing them on a dispatch stack
D) constructing a parallel region

Ans: A
Feedback: 4.5.3
Difficulty: Medium
Essay

26. Why should a web server not run as a single-threaded process?

Ans: For a web server that runs as a single-threaded process, only one client can be serviced at
a time. This could result in potentially enormous wait times for a busy server.
Feedback: 4.1.1
Difficulty: Medium

27. List the four major categories of the benefits of multithreaded programming. Briefly explain
each.

Ans: The benefits of multithreaded programming fall into the categories: responsiveness,
resource sharing, economy, and utilization of multiprocessor architectures. Responsiveness
means that a multithreaded program can allow a program to run even if part of it is blocked.
Resource sharing occurs when an application has several different threads of activity within the
same address space. Threads share the resources of the process to which they belong. As a result,
it is more economical to create new threads than new processes. Finally, a single-threaded
process can only execute on one processor regardless of the number of processors actually
present. Multiple threads can run on multiple processors, thereby increasing efficiency.
Feedback: 4.1.2
Difficulty: Difficult

28. What are the two different ways in which a thread library could be implemented?

Ans: The first technique of implementing the library involves ensuring that all code and data
structures for the library reside in user space with no kernel support. The other approach is to
implement a kernel-level library supported directly by the operating system so that the code and
data structures exist in kernel space.
Feedback: 4.4
Difficulty: Medium

29. Describe two techniques for creating Thread objects in Java.

Ans: One approach is to create a new class that is derived from the Thread class and to override
its run() method. An alternative — and more commonly used — technique is to define a class
that implements the Runnable interface. When a class implements Runnable, it must define a
run() method. The code implementing the run() method is what runs as a separate thread.
Feedback: 4.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

30. In Java, what two things does calling the start() method for a new Thread object
accomplish?

Ans: Calling the start() method for a new Thread object first allocates memory and
initializes a new thread in the JVM. Next, it calls the run() method, making the thread eligible
to be run by the JVM. Note that the run() method is never called directly. Rather, the start()
method is called, which then calls the run() method.
Feedback: 4.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

31. Some UNIX systems have two versions of fork(). Describe the function of each version,
as well as how to decide which version to use.

Ans: One version of fork() duplicates all threads and the other duplicates only the thread that
invoked the fork() system call. Which of the two versions of fork() to use depends on the
application. If exec() is called immediately after forking, then duplicating all threads is
unnecessary, as the program specified in the parameters to exec() will replace the process. If,
however, the separate process does not call exec() after forking, the separate process should
duplicate all threads.
Feedback: 4.6.1
Difficulty: Difficult

32. How can deferred cancellation ensure that thread termination occurs in an orderly manner
as compared to asynchronous cancellation?

Ans: In asynchronous cancellation, the thread is immediately cancelled in response to a

cancellation request. There is no insurance that it did not quit in the middle of a data update or
other potentially dangerous situation. In deferred cancellation, the thread polls whether or not it
should terminate. This way, the thread can be made to cancel at a convenient time.
Feedback: 4.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

33. What is a thread pool and why is it used?

Ans: A thread pool is a collection of threads, created at process startup, that sit and wait for
work to be allocated to them. This allows one to place a bound on the number of concurrent
threads associated with a process and reduce the overhead of creating new threads and destroying
them at termination.
Feedback: 4.5.1
Difficulty: Medium

34. What are the general components of a thread in Windows?

Ans: The thread consists of a unique ID, a register set that represents the status of the processor,
a user stack for user mode, a kernel stack for kernel mode, and a private storage area used by
run-time libraries and dynamic link libraries.
Feedback: 4.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

35. Describe the difference between the fork() and clone() Linux system calls.

Ans: The fork() system call is used to duplicate a process. The clone() system call behaves
similarly except that, instead of creating a copy of the process, it creates a separate process that
shares the address space of the calling process.
Feedback: 4.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

36. Multicore systems present certain challenges for multithreaded programming. Briefly
describe these challenges.

Ans: Multicore systems have placed more pressure on system programmers as well as
application developers to make efficient use of the multiple computing cores. These challenges
include determining how to divide applications into separate tasks that can run in parallel on the
different cores. These tasks must be balanced such that each task is doing an equal amount of
work. Just as tasks must be separated, data must also be divided so that it can be accessed by the
tasks running on separate cores. So that data can safely be accessed, data dependencies must be
identified and where such dependencies exist, data accesses must be synchronized to ensure the
safety of the data. Once all such challenges have been met, there remains considerable challenges
testing and debugging such applications.
Feedback: 4.2.1
Difficulty: Difficult
37. Distinguish between parallelism and concurrency.

Ans: A parallel system can perform more than one task simultaneously. A concurrent system
supports more than one task by allowing multiple tasks to make progress.
Feedback: 4.2
Difficulty: Medium

38. Distinguish between data and task parallelism.

And: Data parallelism involves distributing subsets of the same data across multiple computing
cores and performing the same operation on each core. Task parallelism involves distributing
tasks across the different computing cores where each task is performing a unique operation.
Feedback: 4.2.2
Difficulty: Difficult

39. Describe how OpenMP is a form of implicit threading.

Ans: OpenMP provides a set of compiler directives that allows parallel programming on systems
that support shared memory. Programmers identify regions of code that can run in parallel by
placing them in a block of code that begins with the directive #pragma omp parallel.
When the compiler encounters this parallel directive, it creates as many threads as there are
processing cores in the system.
Feedback: 4.5.2
Difficulty: Difficult

40. Describe how Grand Central Dispatch is a form of implicit threading.

Ans: Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a technology for Mac OS X and iOS systems that is a
combination of extensions to the C language, an API, and a runtime library that allows
developers to construct "blocks" - regions of code that can run in parallel. GCD then manages
the parallel execution of blocks in several dispatch queues.
Feedback: 4.5.3
Difficulty: Difficult

True/False
41. A traditional (or heavyweight) process has a single thread of control.

Ans: True
Feedback: 4.1
Difficulty: Easy

42. A thread is composed of a thread ID, program counter, register set, and heap.

Ans: False
Feedback: 4.1
Difficulty: Medium

43. Virtually all contemporary operating systems support kernel threads.

Ans: True
Feedback: 4.1.1
Difficulty: Easy

44. Linux distinguishes between processes and threads.

Ans: False
Feedback: 4.7.2
Difficulty: Easy

45. In Java, data shared between threads is simply declared globally.

Ans: False
Feedback: 4.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

46. Each thread has its own register set and stack.

Ans: True
Feedback: 4.1
Difficulty: Easy
47. Deferred cancellation is preferred over asynchronous cancellation.

Ans: True
Feedback: 4.6.3
Difficulty: Easy

48. The single benefit of a thread pool is to control the number of threads.

Ans: False
Feedback: 4.5.1
Difficulty: Easy

49. It is possible to create a thread library without any kernel-level support.

Ans: True
Feedback: 4.4
Difficulty: Medium

50. It is possible to have concurrency without parallelism.

And: True
Feedback: 4.2
Difficulty: Medium

51. Amdahl's Law describes performance gains for applications with both a serial and parallel
component.

Ans: True
Feedback: 4.2
Difficulty: Medium

52. OpenMP only works for C, C++, and Fortran programs.

Ans: True
Feedback 4.5.2:
Difficulty: Medium

53. Grand Central Dispatch requires multiple threads.

Ans: False
Feedback: 4.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

54. The trend in developing parallel applications is to use implicit threading.

Ans: True
Feedback: 4.5
Difficulty: Medium

55. Task parallelism distributes threads and data across multiple computing cores.

Ans: False
Feedback: 4.2.2
Difficulty: Difficult
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 5

Multiple Choice

1. A race condition ____.

A) results when several threads try to access the same data concurrently
B) results when several threads try to access and modify the same data concurrently
C) will result only if the outcome of execution does not depend on the order in which
instructions are executed
D) None of the above

Ans: B
Feedback: 5.2
Difficulty: Medium

2. An instruction that executes atomically ____.

A) must consist of only one machine instruction
B) executes as a single, uninterruptible unit
C) cannot be used to solve the critical section problem
D) All of the above

Ans: B
Feedback: 5.4
Difficulty: Medium

3. A counting semaphore ____.

A) is essentially an integer variable
B) is accessed through only one standard operation
C) can be modified simultaneously by multiple threads
D) cannot be used to control access to a thread's critical sections
Ans: A
Feedback: 5.6.1
Difficulty: Medium

4. A mutex lock ____.

A) is exactly like a counting semaphore
B) is essentially a boolean variable
C) is not guaranteed to be atomic
D) can be used to eliminate busy waiting

Ans: B
Feedback: 5.5
Difficulty: Difficult

5. In Peterson's solution, the ____ variable indicates if a process is ready to enter its critical
section.
A) turn
B) lock
C) flag[i]
D) turn[i]

Ans: C
Feedback: 5.3
Difficulty: Easy

6. The first readers-writers problem ____.

A) requires that, once a writer is ready, that writer performs its write as soon as possible.
B) is not used to test synchronization primitives.
C) requires that no reader will be kept waiting unless a writer has already obtained permission
to use the shared database.
D) requires that no reader will be kept waiting unless a reader has already obtained permission
to use the shared database.

Ans: C
Feedback: 5.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

7. A ___ type presents a set of programmer-defined operations that are provided mutual
exclusion within it.
A) transaction
B) signal
C) binary
D) monitor

Ans: D
Feedback: 5.8
Difficulty: Easy

8. ____________ occurs when a higher-priority process needs to access a data structure that is
currently being accessed by a lower-priority process.
A) Priority inversion
B) Deadlock
C) A race condition
D) A critical section

Ans: A
Feedback: 5.6.4
Difficulty: Medium

9. What is the correct order of operations for protecting a critical section using mutex locks?
A) release() followed by acquire()
B) acquire() followed by release()
C) wait() followed by signal()
D) signal() followed by wait()

Ans: B
Feedback: 5.5
Difficulty: Easy

10. What is the correct order of operations for protecting a critical section using a binary
semaphore?
A) release() followed by acquire()
B) acquire() followed by release()
C) wait() followed by signal()
D) signal() followed by wait()

Ans: C
Feedback: 5.6
Difficulty: Easy

11. _____ is not a technique for handling critical sections in operating systems.
A) Nonpreemptive kernels
B) Preemptive kernels
C) Spinlocks
D) Peterson's solution

Ans: D
Feedback: 5.3
Difficulty: Medium

12. A solution to the critical section problem does not have to satisfy which of the following
requirements?
A) mutual exclusion
B) progress
C) atomicity
D) bounded waiting

Ans: C
Feedback: 5.2
Difficulty: Medium

13. A(n) _______ refers to where a process is accessing/updating shared data.

A) critical section
B) entry section
C) mutex
D) test-and-set

Ans: A
Feedback: 5.2
Difficulty: Medium

14. _____ can be used to prevent busy waiting when implementing a semaphore.
A) Spinlocks
B) Waiting queues
C) Mutex lock
D) Allowing the wait() operation to succeed
Ans: B
Feedback: 5.6.
Difficulty: Easy

15. Assume an adaptive mutex is used for accessing shared data on a Solaris system with
multiprocessing capabilities. Which of the following statements is not true?
A) A waiting thread may spin while waiting for the lock to become available.
B) A waiting thread may sleep while waiting for the lock to become available.
C) The adaptive mutex is only used to protect short segments of code.
D) Condition variables and semaphores are never used in place of an adaptive mutex.

Ans: D
Feedback: 5.9.3
Difficulty: Medium

16. What is the purpose of the mutex semaphore in the implementation of the bounded-buffer
problem using semaphores?
A) It indicates the number of empty slots in the buffer.
B) It indicates the number of occupied slots in the buffer.
C) It controls access to the shared buffer.
D) It ensures mutual exclusion.

Ans: D
Feedback: 5.7.1
Difficulty: Medium

17. How many philosophers may eat simultaneously in the Dining Philosophers problem with 5
philosophers?
A) 1
B) 2
C) 3
D) 5

Ans: B
Feedback: 5.7.3
Difficulty: Medium
18. Which of the following statements is true?
A) A counting semaphore can never be used as a binary semaphore.
B) A binary semaphore can never be used as a counting semaphore.
C) Spinlocks can be used to prevent busy waiting in the implementation of semaphore.
D) Counting semaphores can be used to control access to a resource with a finite number of
instances.

Ans: C
Feedback: 5.6
Difficulty: Medium

19. _____ is/are not a technique for managing critical sections in operating systems.
A) Peterson's solution
B) Preemptive kernel
C) Nonpreemptive kernel
D) Semaphores

Ans: A
Feedback: 5.3
Difficulty: Medium

20. When using semaphores, a process invokes the wait() operation before accessing its
critical section, followed by the signal() operation upon completion of its critical section.
Consider reversing the order of these two operations—first calling signal(), then calling
wait(). What would be a possible outcome of this?
A) Starvation is possible.
B) Several processes could be active in their critical sections at the same time.
C) Mutual exclusion is still assured.
D) Deadlock is possible.

Ans: B
Feedback: 5.7
Difficulty: Difficult

21. Which of the following statements is true?

A) Operations on atomic integers do not require locking.
B) Operations on atomic integers do require additional locking.
C) Linux only provides the atomic_inc() and atomic_sub() operations.
D) Operations on atomic integers can be interrupted.
Ans: A
Feedback: 5.9.2
Difficulty: Medium

22. A(n) ___________ is a sequence of read-write operations that are atomic.

A) atomic integer
B) semaphore
C) memory transaction
D) mutex lock

Ans: C
Feedback: 5.10.1
Difficulty: Medium

23. The OpenMP #pragma omp critical directive ___________.

A) behaves much like a mutex lock
B) does not require programmers to identify critical sections
C) does not guarantee prevention of race conditions
D) is similar to functional languages

Ans: A
Feedback: 5.10.2
Difficulty: Medium

24. Another problem related to deadlocks is ____________.

A) race conditions
B) critical sections
C) spinlocks
D) indefinite blocking

Ans: D
Feedback: 5.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

Essay
25. What three conditions must be satisfied in order to solve the critical section problem?

Ans: In a solution to the critical section problem, no thread may be executing in its critical
section if a thread is currently executing in its critical section. Furthermore, only those threads
that are not executing in their critical sections can participate in the decision on which process
will enter its critical section next. Finally, a bound must exist on the number of times that other
threads are allowed to enter their critical state after a thread has made a request to enter its
critical state.
Feedback: 5.2
Difficulty: Medium

26. Explain two general approaches to handle critical sections in operating systems.

Ans: Critical sections may use preemptive or nonpreemptive kernels. A preemptive kernel
allows a process to be preempted while it is running in kernel mode. A nonpreemptive kernel
does not allow a process running in kernel mode to be preempted; a kernel-mode process will run
until it exits kernel mode, blocks, or voluntarily yields control of the CPU. A nonpreemptive
kernel is essentially free from race conditions on kernel data structures, as the contents of this
register will be saved and restored by the interrupt handler.
Feedback: 5.2
Difficulty: Medium

27. Write two short methods that implement the simple semaphore wait() and signal()
operations on global variable S.

Ans: wait (S) {

while (S <= 0);

S--;

signal (S) {

S++;

Feedback: 5.6
Difficulty: Difficult
28. Explain the difference between the first readers–writers problem and the second
readers–-writers problem.

Ans: The first readers–writers problem requires that no reader will be kept waiting unless a
writer has already obtained permission to use the shared database; whereas the second
readers–writers problem requires that once a writer is ready, that writer performs its write as
soon as possible.
Feedback: 5.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

29. Describe the dining-philosophers problem and how it relates to operating systems.

Ans: The scenario involves five philosophers sitting at a round table with a bowl of food and
five chopsticks. Each chopstick sits between two adjacent philosophers. The philosophers are
allowed to think and eat. Since two chopsticks are required for each philosopher to eat, and only
five chopsticks exist at the table, no two adjacent philosophers may be eating at the same time. A
scheduling problem arises as to who gets to eat at what time. This problem is similar to the
problem of scheduling processes that require a limited number of resources.
Feedback: 5.7.3
Difficulty: Medium

30. What is the difference between software transactional memory and hardware transactional
memory?

Ans: Software transactional memory (STM) implements transactional memory entirely in

software, no special hardware is required. STM works by inserting instrumentation code inside
of transaction blocks and typically requires the support of a compiler. Hardware transactional
memory (HTM) implements transactional memory entirely in hardware using cache hierarchies
and cache coherency protocols to resolve conflicts when shared data resides in separate caches.
Feedback: 5.10.1
Difficulty: Difficult

31. Assume you had a function named update() that updates shared data. Illustrate how a mutex
lock named mutex might be used to prevent a race condition in update().

Ans:
void update()
{
mutex.acquire();

// update shared data

mutex.release();
}
Feedback: 5.5
Difficulty: Easy

32. Describe the turnstile structure used by Solaris for synchronization.

Ans: Solaris uses turnstiles to order the list of threads waiting to acquire either an adaptive
mutex or a reader–writer lock. The turnstile is a queue structure containing threads blocked on a
lock. Each synchronized object with at least one thread blocked on the object's lock requires a
separate turnstile. However, rather than associating a turnstile with each synchronized object,
Solaris gives each kernel thread its own turnstile.
Feedback: 5.9.3
Difficulty: Difficult

33. Explain the role of the variable preempt_count in the Linux kernel.

Ans: Each task maintains a value preempt_count which is the number of locks held by each
task. When a lock is acquired, preempt_count is incremented. When a lock is released,
preempt_count is decremented. If the task currently running in the kernel has a value of
preempt_count > 0, the kernel cannot be preempted as the task currently holds a lock.
If the count is zero, the kernel can be preempted.
Feedback: 5.9.2
Difficulty: Difficult

34. Describe how an adaptive mutex functions.

Ans: An adaptive mutex is used in the Solaris operating system to protect access to shared data.
On a multiprocessor system, an adaptive mutex acts as a standard semaphore implemented as a
spinlock. If the shared data being accessed is already locked and the thread holding that lock is
running on another CPU, the thread spins while waiting for the lock to be released, and the data
to become available. If the thread holding the lock is not in the run state, the waiting thread
sleeps until the lock becomes available. On a single processor system, spinlocks are not used and
the waiting thread always sleeps until the lock becomes available.
Feedback: 5.9.3
Difficulty: Difficult

35. Describe a scenario when using a reader–writer lock is more appropriate than another
synchronization tool such as a semaphore.

Ans: A tool such as a semaphore only allows one process to access shared data at a time.
Reader–writer locks are useful when it is easy to distinguish if a process is only reading or
reading/writing shared data. If a process is only reading shared data, it can access the shared data
concurrently with other readers. In the case when there are several readers, a reader–writer lock
may be much more efficient.
Feedback: 5.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

36. Explain how Linux manages race conditions on single-processor systems such as embedded
devices.

Ans: On multiprocessor machines, Linux uses spin locks to manage race conditions. However, as
spin locks are not appropriate on single processor machines, Linux instead disables kernel
preemption which acquiring a spin lock, and enables it after releasing the spin lock.
Feedback: 5.9.2
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

37. Race conditions are prevented by requiring that critical regions be protected by locks.

Ans: True
Feedback: 5.4
Difficulty: Medium

38. The value of a counting semaphore can range only between 0 and 1.

Ans: False
Feedback: 5.6
Difficulty: Easy
39. A deadlock-free solution eliminates the possibility of starvation.

Ans: False
Feedback: 5.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

40. The local variables of a monitor can be accessed by only the local procedures.

Ans: True
Feedback: 5.8
Difficulty: Medium

41. Every object in Java has associated with it a single lock.

Ans: True
Feedback: 5.8
Difficulty: Medium

42. Monitors are a theoretical concept and are not practiced in modern programming languages

Ans: False
Feedback: 5.8
Difficulty: Easy

43. A thread will immediately acquire a dispatcher lock that is the signaled state.

Ans: True
Feedback: 5.9.1
Difficulty: Easy

44. Mutex locks and counting semaphores are essentially the same thing.

Ans: False
Feedback: 5.6
Difficulty: Easy
45. Mutex locks and binary semaphores are essentially the same thing.

Ans: True
Feedback: 5.6
Difficulty: Easy

46. A nonpreemptive kernel is safe from race conditions on kernel data structures.

Ans: True
Feedback: 5.2
Difficulty: Medium

47. Linux mostly uses atomic integers to manage race conditions within the kernel.

Ans: False
Feedback: 5.9.2
Difficulty: Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 6

Multiple Choice

1. Which of the following is true of cooperative scheduling?

A) It requires a timer.
B) A process keeps the CPU until it releases the CPU either by terminating or by switching to
the waiting state.
C) It incurs a cost associated with access to shared data.
D) A process switches from the running state to the ready state when an interrupt occurs.

Ans: B
Feedback: 6.1.3
Difficulty: Medium

2. ____ is the number of processes that are completed per time unit.
A) CPU utilization
B) Response time
C) Turnaround time
D) Throughput

Ans: D
Feedback: 6.2
Difficulty: Medium

3. ____ scheduling is approximated by predicting the next CPU burst with an exponential
average of the measured lengths of previous CPU bursts.
A) Multilevel queue
B) RR
C) FCFS
D) SJF
Ans: D
Feedback: 6.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

4. The ____ scheduling algorithm is designed especially for time-sharing systems.

A) SJF
B) FCFS
C) RR
D) Multilevel queue

Ans: C
Feedback: 6.3.4
Difficulty: Medium

5. Which of the following scheduling algorithms must be nonpreemptive?

A) SJF
B) RR
C) FCFS
D) priority algorithms

Ans: C
Feedback: 6.3.1
Difficulty: Medium

6. Which of the following is true of multilevel queue scheduling?

A) Processes can move between queues.
B) Each queue has its own scheduling algorithm.
C) A queue cannot have absolute priority over lower-priority queues.
D) It is the most general CPU-scheduling algorithm.

Ans: B
Feedback: 6.3.5
Difficulty: Medium

7. The default scheduling class for a process in Solaris is ____.

A) time sharing
B) system
C) interactive
D) real-time

Ans: A
Feedback: 6.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

8. Which of the following statements are false with regards to the Linux CFS scheduler?
A) Each task is assigned a proportion of CPU processing time.
B) Lower numeric values indicate higher relative priorities.
C) There is a single, system-wide value of vruntime.
D) The scheduler doesn't directly assign priorities.

Ans: C
Feedback: 6.7.1
Difficulty: Easy

9. The Linux CFS scheduler identifies _____________ as the interval of time during which
every runnable task should run at least once.
A) virtual run time
B) targeted latency
C) nice value
D) load balancing

Ans: B
Feedback: 6.7.1
Difficulty: Medium

10. In Little's formula, λ, represents the ____.

A) average waiting time in the queue
B) average arrival rate for new processes in the queue
C) average queue length
D) average CPU utilization

Ans: B
Feedback: 5.7.2
Difficulty: Medium
11. In Solaris, what is the time quantum (in milliseconds) of an interactive thread with priority
35?
A) 25
B) 54
C) 80
D) 35

Ans: C
Section: 6.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

12. In Solaris, if an interactive thread with priority 15 uses its entire time quantum, what is its
priority recalculated to?
A) 51
B) 5
C) 160
D) It remains at 15

Ans: B
Feedback: 6.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

13. In Solaris, if an interactive thread with priority 25 is waiting for I/O, what is its priority
recalculated to when it is eligible to run again?
A) 15
B) 120
C) 52
D) It remains at 25

Ans: C
Feedback: 6.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

14. ______ allows a thread to run on only one processor.

A) Processor affinity
B) Processor set
C) NUMA
D) Load balancing

Ans: A
Feedback: 6.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

15. What is the numeric priority of a Windows thread in the NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS

with HIGHEST relative priority?
A) 24
B) 10
C) 8
D) 13

Ans: B
Feedback: 6.7.2
Difficulty: Easy

16. What is the numeric priority of a Windows thread in the HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS with
ABOVE_NORMAL relative priority?
A) 24
B) 10
C) 8
D) 14

Ans: D
Feedback: 6.7.2
Difficulty: Easy

17. What is the numeric priority of a Windows thread in the

BELOW_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS with NORMAL relative priority?
A) 6
B) 7
C) 5
D) 8

Ans: A
Feedback: 6.7.2
Difficulty: Easy

18. __________ involves the decision of which kernel thread to schedule onto which CPU.
A) Process-contention scope
B) System-contention scope
C) Dispatcher
D) Round-robin scheduling

Ans: B
Feedback: 6.4.1
Difficulty: Easy

19. With _______ a thread executes on a processor until a long-latency event (i.e. a memory
stall) occurs.
A) coarse-grained multithreading
B) fine-grained multithreading
C) virtualization
D) multicore processors

Ans: A
Feedback: 6.5.4
Difficulty: Medium

20. A significant problem with priority scheduling algorithms is _____.

A) complexity
B) starvation
C) determining the length of the next CPU burst
D) determining the length of the time quantum

Ans: B
Feedback: 6.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

21. The ______ occurs in first-come-first-served scheduling when a process with a long CPU
burst occupies the CPU.
A) dispatch latency
B) waiting time
C) convoy effect
D) system-contention scope

Ans: C
Feedback: 6.3.1
Difficulty: Medium
22. The rate of a periodic task in a hard real-time system is ____, where p is a period and t is
the processing time.
A) 1/p
B) p/t
C) 1/t
D) pt

Ans: A
Section: 6.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

23. Which of the following is true of the rate-monotonic scheduling algorithm?

A) The task with the shortest period will have the lowest priority.
B) It uses a dynamic priority policy.
C) CPU utilization is bounded when using this algorithm.
D) It is non-preemptive.

Ans: C
Section: 6.6.3
Difficulty: Difficult

24. Which of the following is true of earliest-deadline-first (EDF) scheduling algorithm?

A) When a process becomes runnable, it must announce its deadline requirements to the
system.
B) Deadlines are assigned as following: the earlier the deadline, the lower the priority; the later
the deadline, the higher the priority.
C) Priorities are fixed; that is, they cannot be adjusted when a new process starts running.
D) It assigns priorities statically according to deadline.

Ans: A
Section: 6.6.4
Difficulty: Medium

25. The two general approaches to load balancing are __________ and ____________.
A) soft affinity, hard affinity
B) coarse grained, fine grained
C) soft real-time, hard real-time
D) push migration, pull migration

Ans: D
Section: 6.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

Essay

26. Distinguish between coarse-grained and fine-grained multithreading.

Ans: There are two approaches to multithread a processor. (1) Coarse-grained multithreading
allows a thread to run on a processor until a long-latency event, such as waiting for memory, to
occur. When a long-latency event does occur, the processor switches to another thread. (2)
Fine-grained multithreading switches between threads at a much finer-granularity, such as
between instructions.
Feedback: 6.5.4
Difficulty: Medium

27. Explain the concept of a CPU–I/O burst cycle.

Ans: The lifecycle of a process can be considered to consist of a number of bursts belonging to
two different states. All processes consist of CPU cycles and I/O operations. Therefore, a process
can be modeled as switching between bursts of CPU execution and I/O wait.
Feedback: 6.1.1
Difficulty: Medium

28. What role does the dispatcher play in CPU scheduling?

Ans: The dispatcher gives control of the CPU to the process selected by the short-term
scheduler. To perform this task, a context switch, a switch to user mode, and a jump to the proper
location in the user program are all required. The dispatch should be made as fast as possible.
The time lost to the dispatcher is termed dispatch latency.
Feedback: 6.1.4
Difficulty: Medium
29. Explain the difference between response time and turnaround time. These times are both
used to measure the effectiveness of scheduling schemes.

Ans: Turnaround time is the sum of the periods that a process is spent waiting to get into
memory, waiting in the ready queue, executing on the CPU, and doing I/O. Turnaround time
essentially measures the amount of time it takes to execute a process. Response time, on the
other hand, is a measure of the time that elapses between a request and the first response
produced.
Feedback: 6.2
Difficulty: Medium

30. What effect does the size of the time quantum have on the performance of an RR
algorithm?

Ans: At one extreme, if the time quantum is extremely large, the RR policy is the same as the
FCFS policy. If the time quantum is extremely small, the RR approach is called processor
sharing and creates the appearance that each of n processes has its own processor running at 1/n
the speed of the real processor.
Feedback: 6.3.4
Difficulty: Medium

31. Explain the process of starvation and how aging can be used to prevent it.

Ans: Starvation occurs when a process is ready to run but is stuck waiting indefinitely for the
CPU. This can be caused, for example, when higher-priority processes prevent low-priority
processes from ever getting the CPU. Aging involves gradually increasing the priority of a
process so that a process will eventually achieve a high enough priority to execute if it waited for
a long enough period of time.
Feedback: 6.3.3
Difficulty: Difficult

32. Explain the fundamental difference between asymmetric and symmetric multiprocessing.

Ans: In asymmetric multiprocessing, all scheduling decisions, I/O, and other system activities
are handled by a single processor, whereas in SMP, each processor is self-scheduling.
Feedback: 6.5.1
Difficulty: Medium
33. Describe two general approaches to load balancing.

Ans: With push migration, a specific task periodically checks the load on each processor and —
if it finds an imbalance—evenly distributes the load by moving processes from overloaded to
idle or less-busy processors. Pull migration occurs when an idle processor pulls a waiting task
from a busy processor. Push and pull migration are often implemented in parallel on
load-balancing systems.
Feedback: 6.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

34. In Windows, how does the dispatcher determine the order of thread execution?

Ans: The dispatcher uses a 32-level priority scheme to determine the execution order. Priorities
are divided into two classes. The variable class contains threads having priorities from 1 to 15,
and the real-time class contains threads having priorities from 16 to 31. The dispatcher uses a
queue for each scheduling priority, and traverses the set of queues from highest to lowest until it
finds a thread that is ready to run. The dispatcher executes an idle thread if no ready thread is
found.
Feedback: 6.7.2
Difficulty: Difficult

35. What is deterministic modeling and when is it useful in evaluating an algorithm?

Ans: Deterministic modeling takes a particular predetermined workload and defines the
performance of each algorithm for that workload. Deterministic modeling is simple, fast, and
gives exact numbers for comparison of algorithms. However, it requires exact numbers for input,
and its answers apply only in those cases. The main uses of deterministic modeling are
describing scheduling algorithms and providing examples to indicate trends.
Feedback: 6.8.1
Difficulty: Medium

36. What are the two types of latency that affect the performance of real-time systems?

Ans: Interrupt latency refers to the period of time from the arrival of an interrupt at the CPU to
the start of the routine that services the interrupt. Dispatch latency refers to the amount of time
required for the scheduling dispatcher to stop one process and start another.
Section: 6.6.1
Difficulty: Medium
37. What are the advantages of the EDF scheduling algorithm over the rate-monotonic
scheduling algorithm? 

Ans: Unlike the rate-monotonic algorithm, EDF scheduling does not require that processes be
periodic, nor must a process require a constant amount of CPU time per burst. The appeal of
EDF scheduling is that it is theoretically optimal - theoretically, it can schedule processes so that
each process can meet its deadline requirements and CPU utilization will be 100 percent.
Section: 6.6.4
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

38. In preemptive scheduling, the sections of code affected by interrupts must be guarded from
simultaneous use.

Ans: True
Feedback: 6.1.3
Difficulty: Medium

39. In RR scheduling, the time quantum should be small with respect to the context-switch
time.

Ans: False
Feedback: 6.3.4
Difficulty: Medium

40. The most complex scheduling algorithm is the multilevel feedback-queue algorithm.

Ans: True
Feedback: 6.3.6
Difficulty: Medium

41. Load balancing is typically only necessary on systems with a common run queue.

Ans: False
Feedback: 6.5.3
Difficulty: Medium
42. Systems using a one-to-one model (such as Windows, Solaris , and Linux) schedule threads
using process-contention scope (PCS).

Ans: False
Feedback: 6.4.1
Difficulty: Easy

43. Solaris and Windows assign higher-priority threads/tasks longer time quantums and
lower-priority tasks shorter time quantums.

Ans: False
Feedback: 6.7
Difficulty: Medium

44. A Solaris interactive thread with priority 15 has a higher relative priority than an interactive
thread with priority 20

Ans: False
Feedback: 6.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

45. A Solaris interactive thread with a time quantum of 80 has a higher priority than an
interactive thread with a time quantum of 120.

Ans: True
Feedback: 6.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

46. SMP systems that use multicore processors typically run faster than SMP systems that place
each processor on separate cores.

Ans: True
Feedback: 6.5.4
Difficulty: Easy
47. Windows 7 User-mode scheduling (UMS) allows applications to create and manage thread
independently of the kernel

Ans: True
Feedback: 6.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

48. Round-robin (RR) scheduling degenerates to first-come-first-served (FCFS) scheduling if the

time quantum is too long.

Ans: True
Feedback: 6.3.4
Difficulty: Easy

49. Load balancing algorithms have no impact on the benefits of processor affinity.

Ans: False
Feedback: 6.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

50. A multicore system allows two (or more) threads that are in compute cycles to execute at the
same time.

Ans: True
Feedback: 6.5.4
Difficulty: Easy

51. Providing a preemptive, priority-based scheduler guarantees hard real-time functionality.

Ans: False
Section: 6.6
Difficulty: Difficult

52. In hard real-time systems, interrupt latency must be bounded.

Ans: True
Section: 6.6.1
Difficulty: Medium

53. In Pthread real-time scheduling, the SCHED_FIFO class provides time slicing among
threads of equal priority.

Ans: False
Section: 6.6.6
Difficulty: Medium

54. In the Linux CFS scheduler, the task with smallest value of vruntime is considered to have
the highest priority.

Ans: True
Section: 6.7.1
Difficulty: Medium

55. The length of a time quantum assigned by the Linux CFS scheduler is dependent upon the
relative priority of a task.

Ans: False
Section: 6.7.1
Difficulty: Medium

56. The Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) is the default scheduler for Linux systems.

Ans: True
Section: 6.7.1
Difficulty: Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 7

Multiple Choice

1. A deadlocked state occurs whenever ____.

A) a process is waiting for I/O to a device that does not exist
B) the system has no available free resources
C) every process in a set is waiting for an event that can only be caused by another process in
the set
D) a process is unable to release its request for a resource after use

Ans: C
Feedback: 7.1
Difficulty: Medium

2. One necessary condition for deadlock is ____, which states that at least one resource must be
held in a nonsharable mode.
A) hold and wait
B) mutual exclusion
C) circular wait
D) no preemption

Ans: B
Feedback: 7.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

3. One necessary condition for deadlock is ______, which states that a process must be holding
one resource and waiting to acquire additional resources.
A) hold and wait
B) mutual exclusion
C) circular wait
D) no preemption

Ans: A
Feedback: 7.2.1
Difficulty: Easy

4. One necessary condition for deadlock is ______, which states that a resource can be released
only voluntarily by the process holding the resource.
A) hold and wait
B) mutual exclusion
C) circular wait
D) no preemption

Ans: D
Feedback: 7.2.1
Difficulty: Easy

5. One necessary condition for deadlock is ______, which states that there is a chain of waiting
processes whereby P0 is waiting for a resource held by P1, P1 is waiting for a resource held by P2,
and Pn is waiting for a resource held by P0.
A) hold and wait
B) mutual exclusion
C) circular wait
D) no preemption

Ans: C
Feedback: 7.2.1
Difficulty: Easy

6. The witness software product is a ____.

A) lock-order verifier that uses mutual-exclusion locks to protect critical sections
B) modeler to develop resource allocation graphs
C) driver that can be used to prevent mutual exclusion for nonsharable resources
D) implementation of the banker's algorithm available for most operating systems

Ans: A
Feedback: 7.4.4
Difficulty: Medium
7. In a system resource-allocation graph, ____.
A) a directed edge from a process to a resource is called an assignment edge
B) a directed edge from a resource to a process is called a request edge
C) a directed edge from a process to a resource is called a request edge
D) None of the above

Ans: C
Feedback: 7.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

8. A cycle in a resource-allocation graph is ____.

A) a necessary and sufficient condition for deadlock in the case that each resource has more than
one instance
B) a necessary and sufficient condition for a deadlock in the case that each resource has exactly
one instance
C) a sufficient condition for a deadlock in the case that each resource has more than once
instance
D) is neither necessary nor sufficient for indicating deadlock in the case that each resource has
exactly one instance

Ans: B
Feedback: 7.2.2
Difficulty: Difficult

9. To handle deadlocks, operating systems most often _____.

A) pretend that deadlocks never occur
B) use protocols to prevent or avoid deadlocks
C) detect and recover from deadlocks
D) None of the above

Ans: A
Feedback: 7.3
Difficulty: Medium

10. Which of the following statements is true?

A) A safe state is a deadlocked state.
B) A safe state may lead to a deadlocked state.
C) An unsafe state is necessarily, and by definition, always a deadlocked state.
D) An unsafe state may lead to a deadlocked state.
Ans: D
Feedback: 7.5.1
Difficulty: Medium

11. Suppose that there are ten resources available to three processes. At time 0, the following
data is collected. The table indicates the process, the maximum number of resources needed by
the process, and the number of resources currently owned by each process. Which of the
following correctly characterizes this state?

Process Maximum Needs Currently Owned

P0 10 4
P1 3 1
P2 6 4
A) It is safe.
B) It is not safe.
C) The state cannot be determined.
D) It is an impossible state.

Ans: B
Feedback: 7.5.1
Difficulty: Difficult

12. Suppose that there are 12 resources available to three processes. At time 0, the following
data is collected. The table indicates the process, the maximum number of resources needed by
the process, and the number of resources currently owned by each process. Which of the
following correctly characterizes this state?

Process Maximum Needs Currently Owned

P0 10 4
P1 3 2
P2 7 4
A) It is safe.
B) It is not safe.
C) The state cannot be determined.
D) It is an impossible state.

Ans: A
Feedback: 7.5.1
Difficulty: Difficult
13. Which of the following data structures in the banker's algorithm is a vector of length m,
where m is the number of resource types?
A) Need
B) Allocation
C) Max
D) Available

Ans: D
Feedback: 7.5.3
Difficulty: Easy

14. Assume there are three resources, R1, R2, and R3, that are each assigned unique integer
values 15, 10, and 25, respectively. What is a resource ordering which prevents a circular wait?
A) R1, R2, R3
B) R3, R2, R1
C) R3, R1, R2
D) R2, R1, R3

Ans: D
Feedback: 7.4.4
Difficulty: Medium

15. A _____ could be preempted from a process.

A) mutex lock
B) CPU
C) semaphore
D) file lock

Ans: B
Feedback: 7.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

Essay

16. Explain what has to happen for a set of processes to achieve a deadlocked state.

Ans: For a set of processes to exist in a deadlocked state, every process in the set must be
waiting for an event that can be caused only be another process in the set. Thus, the processes
cannot ever exit this state without manual intervention.
Feedback: 7.1
Difficulty: Medium

17. Describe the four conditions that must hold simultaneously in a system if a deadlock is to
occur.

Ans: For a set of processes to be deadlocked: at least one resource must remain in a nonsharable
mode, a process must hold at least one resource and be waiting to acquire additional resources
held by other processes, resources in the system cannot be preempted, and a circular wait has to
exist between processes.
Feedback: 7.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

18. What are the three general ways that a deadlock can be handled?

Ans: A deadlock can be prevented by using protocols to ensure that a deadlock will never occur.
A system may allow a deadlock to occur, detect it, and recover from it. Lastly, an operating
system may just ignore the problem and pretend that deadlocks can never occur.
Feedback: 7.3
Difficulty: Medium

19. What is the difference between deadlock prevention and deadlock avoidance?

Ans: Deadlock prevention is a set of methods for ensuring that at least one of the necessary
conditions for deadlock cannot hold. Deadlock avoidance requires that the operating system be
given, in advance, additional information concerning which resources a process will request and
use during its lifetime.
Feedback: 7.4
Difficulty: Medium

20. Describe two protocols to ensure that the hold-and-wait condition never occurs in a system.

Ans: One protocol requires each process to request and be allocated all its resources before it
begins execution. We can implement this provision by requiring that system calls requesting
resources for a process precede all other system calls. An alternative protocol allows a process to
request resources only when it has none. A process may request some resources and use them.
Before it can request any additional resources, however, it must release all the resources that it is
currently allocated.
Feedback: 7.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

21. What is one way to ensure that a circular-wait condition does not occur?

Ans: One way to ensure that this condition never holds is to impose a total ordering of all
resource types, and to require that each process requests resources in an increasing order of
enumeration. This can be accomplished by assigning each resource type a unique integer number
to determine whether one precedes another in the ordering.
Feedback: 7.4.4
Difficulty: Medium

22. What does a claim edge signify in a resource-allocation graph?

Ans: A claim edge indicates that a process may request a resource at some time in the future.
This edge resembles a request edge in direction, but is represented in the graph by a dashed line.
Feedback: 7.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

23. Describe a wait-for graph and how it detects deadlock.

Ans: If all resources have only a single instance, then we can define a deadlock-detection
algorithm that uses a variant of the resource-allocation graph, called a wait-for graph. We obtain
this graph from the resource-allocation graph by removing the resource nodes and collapsing the
appropriate edges. To detect deadlocks, the system needs to maintain the wait-for graph and
periodically invoke an algorithm that searches for a cycle in the graph.
Feedback: 7.6.1
Difficulty: Medium

24. What factors influence the decision of when to invoke a detection algorithm?

Ans: The first factor is how often a deadlock is likely to occur; if deadlocks occur frequently,
the detection algorithm should be invoked frequently. The second factor is how many processes
will be affected by deadlock when it happens; if the deadlock-detection algorithm is invoked for
every resource request, a considerable overhead in computation time will be incurred.
Feedback: 7.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

25. Describe two methods for eliminating processes by aborting a process.

Ans: The first method is to abort all deadlocked processes. Aborting all deadlocked processes
will clearly break the deadlock cycle; however, the deadlocked processes may have to be
computed for a long time, and results of these partial computations must be discarded and will
probably have to be recomputed later. The second method is to abort one process at a time until
the deadlock cycle is eliminated. Aborting one process at a time incurs considerable overhead,
since, after each process is aborted, a deadlock-detection algorithm must be invoked to determine
whether any processes are still deadlocked.
Feedback: 7.7.1
Difficulty: Medium

26. Name three issues that need to be addressed if a preemption is required to deal with
deadlocks.

Ans: First, the order of resources and processes that need to be preempted must be determined to
minimize cost. Second, if a resource is preempted from a process, the process must be rolled
back to some safe state and restarted from that state. The simplest solution is a total rollback.
Finally, we must ensure that starvation does not occur from always preempting resources from
the same process.
Feedback: 7.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

27. Describe how a safe state ensures deadlock will be avoided.

Ans: A safe state ensures that there is a sequence of processes to finish their program execution.
Deadlock is not possible while the system is in a safe state. However, if a system goes from a
safe state to an unsafe state, deadlock is possible. One technique for avoiding deadlock is to
ensure that the system always stays in a safe state. This can be done by only assigning a resource
as long as it maintains the system in a safe state.
Feedback: 7.5.1
Difficulty: Medium

True/False
28. The circular-wait condition for a deadlock implies the hold-and-wait condition.

Ans: True
Feedback: 7.2
Difficulty: Medium

29. If a resource-allocation graph has a cycle, the system must be in a deadlocked state.

Ans: False
Feedback: 7.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

30. Protocols to prevent hold-and-wait conditions typically also prevent starvation.

Ans: False
Feedback: 7.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

31. The wait-for graph scheme is not applicable to a resource allocation system with multiple
instances of each resource type.

Ans: True
Feedback: 7.6.1
Difficulty: Medium

32. Ordering resources and requiring the resources to be acquired in order prevents the circular
wait from occurring and therefore prevents deadlock from occurring.

Ans: False
Feedback: 7.4.4
Difficulty: Medium

33. The banker's algorithm is useful in a system with multiple instances of each resource type.

Ans: True
Feedback: 7.5.3
Difficulty: Easy

34. A system in an unsafe state will ultimately deadlock.

Ans: False
Feedback: 7.5.1
Difficulty: Medium

35. Deadlock prevention and deadlock avoidance are essentially the same approaches for
handling deadlock.

Ans: False
Feedback: 7.5
Difficulty: Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 8

Multiple Choice

1. Absolute code can be generated for ____.

A) compile-time binding
B) load-time binding
C) execution-time binding
D) interrupt binding

Ans: A
Feedback: 8.1.2
Difficulty: Easy

2. _____ is the method of binding instructions and data to memory performed by most
general-purpose operating systems.
A) Interrupt binding
B) Compile time binding
C) Execution time binding
D) Load-time binding

Ans: C
Feedback: 8.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

3. An address generated by a CPU is referred to as a ____.

A) physical address
B) logical address
C) post relocation register address
D) Memory-Management Unit (MMU) generated address
Ans: B
Feedback: 8.1.3
Difficulty: Easy

4. Suppose a program is operating with execution-time binding and the physical address
generated is 300. The relocation register is set to 100. What is the corresponding logical address?
A) 199
B) 201
C) 200
D) 300

Ans: C
Feedback: 8.1.3
Difficulty: Easy

5. The mapping of a logical address to a physical address is done in hardware by the ________.
A) memory-management-unit (MMU)
B) memory address register
C) relocation register
D) dynamic loading register

Ans: A
Feedback: 8.1.3
Difficulty: Medium

6. In a dynamically linked library, ____.

A) loading is postponed until execution time
B) system language libraries are treated like any other object module
C) more disk space is used than in a statically linked library
D) a stub is included in the image for each library-routine reference

Ans: D
Feedback: 8.1.5
Difficulty: Medium

7. The _____ binding scheme facilitates swapping.

A) interrupt time
B) load time
C) assembly time
D) execution time

Ans: D
Feedback: 8.2
Difficulty: Medium

8. The roll out, roll in variant of swapping is used ____.

A) when a backing store is not necessary
B) for the round-robin scheduling algorithm
C) for priority-based scheduling algorithms
D) when the load on the system has temporarily been reduced

Ans: C
Feedback: 8.2
Difficulty: Medium

9. _____ is the dynamic storage-allocation algorithm which results in the smallest leftover hole
in memory.
A) First fit
B) Best fit
C) Worst fit
D) None of the above

Ans: B
Feedback: 8.3.2
Difficulty: Easy

10. _____ is the dynamic storage-allocation algorithm which results in the largest leftover hole
in memory.
A) First fit
B) Best fit
C) Worst fit
D) None of the above

Ans: C
Feedback: 8.3.2
Difficulty: Easy
11. Which of the following is true of compaction?
A) It can be done at assembly, load, or execution time.
B) It is used to solve the problem of internal fragmentation.
C) It cannot shuffle memory contents.
D) It is possible only if relocation is dynamic and done at execution time.

Ans: D
Feedback: 8.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

12. A(n) ____ page table has one page entry for each real page (or frame) of memory.
A) inverted
B) clustered
C) forward-mapped
D) virtual

Ans: A
Feedback: 8.6.3
Difficulty: Easy

13. Consider a logical address with a page size of 8 KB. How many bits must be used to
represent the page offset in the logical address?
A) 10
B) 8
C) 13
D) 12

Ans: C
Feedback: 8.5
Difficulty: Easy

14. Consider a logical address with 18 bits used to represent an entry in a conventional page table.
How many entries are in the conventional page table?
A) 262144
B) 1024
C) 1048576
D) 18

Ans: A
Feedback: 8.5
Difficulty: Easy

15. Assume a system has a TLB hit ratio of 90%. It requires 15 nanoseconds to access the TLB,
and 85 nanoseconds to access main memory. What is the effective memory access time in
nanoseconds for this system?
A) 108.5
B) 100
C) 22
D) 176.5

Ans: A
Feedback: 8.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

16. Given the logical address 0xAEF9 (in hexadecimal) with a page size of 256 bytes, what is the
page number?
A) 0xAE
B) 0xF9
C) 0xA
D) 0x00F9

Ans: A
Feedback: 8.5
Difficulty: Medium

17. Given the logical address 0xAEF9 (in hexadecimal) with a page size of 256 bytes, what is the
page offset?
A) 0xAE
B) 0xF9
C) 0xA
D) 0xF900

Ans: B
Feedback: 8.5
Difficulty: Medium

18. Consider a 32-bit address for a two-level paging system with an 8 KB page size. The outer
page table has 1024 entries. How many bits are used to represent the second-level page table?
A) 10
B) 8
C) 12
D) 9

Ans: D
Feedback: 8.6.1
Difficulty: Medium

19. With segmentation, a logical address consists of _____.

A) segment number and offset
B) segment name and offset
C) segment number and page number
D) segment table and segment number

Ans: A
Feedback: 8.4.1
Difficulty: Easy

20. Which of the following data structures is appropriate for placing into its own segment?
A) heap
B) kernel code and data
C) user code and data
D) all of the above

Ans: D
Feedback: 8.4
Difficulty: Easy

21. Assume the value of the base and limit registers are 1200 and 350 respectively. Which of the
following addresses is legal?
A) 355
B) 1200
C) 1551
D) all of the above

Ans: B
Feedback: 8.1.1
Difficulty: Easy
22. A(n) ______ matches the process with each entry in the TLB.
A) address-space identifier
B) process id
C) stack
D) page number

Ans: A
Feedback: 8.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

23. Which of the following statements are true with respect to hashed page tables?
A) They only work for sparse address spaces.
B) The virtual address is used to hash into the hash table.
C) A common approach for handling address spaces larger than 32 bits.
D) Hash table collisions do not occur because of the importance of paging.

Ans: C
Feedback: 8.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

24. Which of the following statements regarding the ARM architecture are false?
A) There are essentially four different page ranging from 4-KB to 16-MB in size.
B) There are two different levels of TLB.
C) One or two level paging may be used.
D) The micro TLB must be flushed at each context switch.

Ans: D
Feedback: 8.8
Difficulty: Difficult

25. Which of the following is not a reason explaining why mobile devices generally do not
support swapping?
A) Limited space constraints of flash memory.
B) Small size of mobile applications do not require use of swap space.
C) Limited number of writes of flash memory.
D) Poor throughput between main memory and flash memory.
Ans: B
Feedback: 8.2.2
Difficulty: Difficult

Essay

26. What is the advantage of using dynamic loading?

Ans: With dynamic loading a program does not have to be stored, in its entirety, in main
memory. This allows the system to obtain better memory-space utilization. This also allows
unused routines to stay out of main memory so that memory can be used more effectively. For
example, code used to handle an obscure error would not always use up main memory.
Feedback: 8.1.4
Difficulty: Medium

27. What is the context switch time, associated with swapping, if a disk drive with a transfer
rate of 2 MB/s is used to swap out part of a program that is 200 KB in size? Assume that no
seeks are necessary and that the average latency is 15 ms. The time should reflect only the
amount of time necessary to swap out the process.

Ans: 200KB / 2048 KB per second + 15 ms = 113 ms

Feedback: 8.2
Difficulty: Medium

28. When does external fragmentation occur?

Ans: As processes are loaded and removed from memory, the free memory space is broken into
little pieces. External fragmentation exists when there is enough total memory space to satisfy a
request, but the available spaces are not contiguous; storage is fragmented into a large number of
small holes. Both the first-fit and best-fit strategies for memory allocation suffer from external
fragmentation.
Feedback: 8.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

29. Distinguish between internal and external fragmentation.

Ans: Fragmentation occurs when memory is allocated and returned to the system. As this occurs,
free memory is broken up into small chunks, often too small to be useful. External fragmentation
occurs when there is sufficient total free memory to satisfy a memory request, yet the memory is
not contiguous, so it cannot be assigned. Some contiguous allocation schemes may assign a
process more memory than it actually requested (i.e. they may assign memory in fixed-block
sizes). Internal fragmentation occurs when a process is assigned more memory than it has
requested and the wasted memory fragment is internal to a process.
Feedback: 8.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

30. Explain the basic method for implementing paging.

Ans: Physical memory is broken up into fixed-sized blocks called frames while logical memory
is broken up into equal-sized blocks called pages. Whenever the CPU generates a logical address,
the page number and offset into that page is used, in conjunction with a page table, to map the
request to a location in physical memory.
Feedback: 8.5
Difficulty: Medium

31. Describe how a transaction look-aside buffer (TLB) assists in the translation of a logical
address to a physical address.

Ans: Typically, large page tables are stored in main memory, and a page-table base register
points are saved to the page table. Therefore, two memory accesses are needed to access a byte
(one for the page-table entry, one for the byte), causing memory access to be slowed by a factor
of 2. The standard solution to this problem is to use a TLB, a special, small fast-lookup
hardware cache. The TLB is associative, high speed memory. Each entry consists of a key and
value. An item is compared with all keys simultaneously, and if the item is found, the
corresponding value is returned.
Feedback: 8.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

32. How are illegal page addresses recognized and trapped by the operating system?

Ans: Illegal addresses are trapped by the use of a valid-invalid bit, which is generally attached
to each entry in the page table. When this bit is set to "valid," the associated page is in the
process's logical address space and is thus a legal (or valid) page. When the bit is set to "invalid,"
the page is not in the process's logical address space. The operating system sets this bit for each
page to allow or disallow access to the page.
Feedback: 8.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

33. Describe the elements of a hashed page table.

Ans: A hashed page table contains hash values which correspond to a virtual page number.
Each entry in the hash table contains a linked list of elements that hash to the same location (to
handle collisions). Each element consists of three fields: (1) the virtual page number, (2) the
value of the mapped page frame, and (3) a pointer to the next element in the linked list.
Feedback: 8.6.2
Difficulty: Difficult

34. Briefly describe the segmentation memory management scheme. How does it differ from
the paging memory management scheme in terms of the user's view of memory?

Ans: Segmentation views a logical address as a collection of segments. Each segment has a
name and length. The addresses specify both the segment name and the offset within the segment.
The user therefore specifies each address by two quantities: a segment name and an offset. In
contrast, in a paging scheme, the user specifies a single address, which is partitioned by the
hardware into a page number and an offset, all invisible to the programmer.
Feedback: 8.4
Difficulty: Medium

35. Describe the partitions in a logical-address space of a process in the IA-32 architecture.

Ans: The logical-address space is divided into two partitions. The first partition consists of up
to 8 K segments that are private to that process. The second partition consists of up to 8 K
segments that are shared among all the processes. Information about the first partition is kept in
the local descriptor table (LDT); information about the second partition is kept in the global
descriptor table (GDT).
Feedback: 8.7.1
Difficulty: Difficult

36. How is a limit register used for protecting main memory?

Ans: When the CPU is executing a process, it generates a logical memory address that is added
to a relocation register in order to arrive at the physical memory address actually used by main
memory. A limit register holds the maximum logical address that the CPU should be able to
access. If any logical address is greater than or equal to the value in the limit register, then the
logical address is a dangerous address and an error results.
Feedback: 8.1.1
Difficulty: Medium

37. Using Figure 8.14, describe how a logical address is translated to a physical address.

Ans: A logical address is generated by the CPU. This logical address consists of a page number
and offset. The TLB is first checked to see if the page number is present. If so, a TLB hit, the
corresponding page frame is extracted from the TLB, thus producing the physical address. In the
case of a TLB miss, the page table must be searched according to page number for the
corresponding page frame.
Feedback: 8.4
Difficulty: Medium

38. Explain why mobile operating systems generally do not support paging.

Ans: Mobile operating systems typically do not support swapping because file systems are
typically employed using flash memory instead of magnetic hard disks. Flash memory is
typically limited in size as well as having poor throughput between flash and main memory.
Additionally, flash memory can only tolerate a limited number of writes before it becomes less
reliable.
Feedback:
Difficulty: Medium

39. Using Figure 8.26, describe how address translation is performed on ARM architectures.

Ans: ARM supports four different page sizes: 4-KB and 16-KB page use two-level paging, the
larger 1-MB and 16-MB page sizes use single-level paging. The ARM architecture uses two
levels of TLBs - at one level is the micro TLB which is in fact separate TLBs for data and
instructions. At the inner level is a single main TLB. Address translation begins wit first
searching the micro TLB, and in case of a TLB miss, the main TLB is then checked. If the
reference is not in the main TLB, the page table must then be consulted.
Feedback: 8.8
Difficulty: Medium

True/False
40. A relocation register is used to check for invalid memory addresses generated by a CPU.

Ans: False
Feedback: 8.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

41. Reentrant code cannot be shared.

Ans: False
Feedback: 8.5.4
Difficulty: Easy

42. There is a 1:1 correspondence between the number of entries in the TLB and the number of
entries in the page table.

Ans: False
Feedback: 8.5.2
Difficulty: Easy

43. Hierarchical page tables are appropriate for 64-bit architectures.

Ans: False
Feedback: 8.6.1
Difficulty: Medium

43. The ARM architecture uses both single-level and two-level paging.

Ans: True
Feedback: 8.8
Difficulty: Medium

44. Fragmentation does not occur in a paging system.

Ans: False
Feedback: 8.5
Difficult: Medium

45. Hashed page tables are particularly useful for processes with sparse address spaces.

Ans: True
Feedback: 8.6.2
Difficulty: Easy

46. Inverted page tables require each process to have its own page table.

Ans: False
Feedback: 8.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

47. Without a mechanism such as an address-space identifier, the TLB must be flushed during a
context switch.

Ans: True
Feedback: 8.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

48. A 32-bit logical address with 8 KB page size will have 1,000,000 entries in a conventional
page table.

Ans: False
Feedback: 8.5
Difficulty: Medium

49. Hashed page tables are commonly used when handling addresses larger than 32 bits.

Ans: True
Feedback: 8.6.2
Difficulty: Easy
50. The x86-64 bit architecture only uses 48 of the 64 possible bits for representing virtual
address space.

Ans: True
Feedback: 8.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

51. Mobile operating systems typically support swapping.

Ans: False
Feedback: 8.2.2
Difficulty: Easy
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 9

Multiple Choice

1. Which of the following is a benefit of allowing a program that is only partially in memory to
execute?
A) Programs can be written to use more memory than is available in physical memory.
B) CPU utilization and throughput is increased.
C) Less I/O is needed to load or swap each user program into memory.
D) All of the above

Ans: D
Feedback: 9.1
Difficulty: Easy

2. In systems that support virtual memory, ____.

A) virtual memory is separated from logical memory.
B) virtual memory is separated from physical memory.
C) physical memory is separated from secondary storage.
D) physical memory is separated from logical memory.

Ans: D
Feedback: 9.1
Difficulty: Medium

3. The vfork() system call in UNIX ____.

A) allows the child process to use the address space of the parent
B) uses copy-on-write with the fork() call
C) is not intended to be used when the child process calls exec() immediately after creation
D) duplicates all pages that are modified by the child process
Ans: A
Feedback: 9.1
Difficulty: Easy

4. Suppose we have the following page accesses: 1 2 3 4 2 3 4 1 2 1 1 3 1 4 and that there are
three frames within our system. Using the FIFO replacement algorithm, what is the number of
page faults for the given reference string?
A) 14
B) 8
C) 13
D) 10

Ans: B
Feedback: 9.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

5. Suppose we have the following page accesses: 1 2 3 4 2 3 4 1 2 1 1 3 1 4 and that there are
three frames within our system. Using the FIFO replacement algorithm, what will be the final
configuration of the three frames following the execution of the given reference string?
A) 4, 1, 3
B) 3, 1, 4
C) 4, 2, 3
D) 3, 4, 2

Ans: D
Feedback: 9.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

6. Suppose we have the following page accesses: 1 2 3 4 2 3 4 1 2 1 1 3 1 4 and that there are
three frames within our system. Using the LRU replacement algorithm, what is the number of
page faults for the given reference string?

A) 14
B) 13
C) 8
D) 10

Ans: C
Feedback: 9.4.4
Difficulty: Medium
7. Given the reference string of page accesses: 1 2 3 4 2 3 4 1 2 1 1 3 1 4 and a system with
three page frames, what is the final configuration of the three frames after the LRU algorithm is
applied?
A) 1, 3, 4
B) 3, 1, 4
C) 4, 1, 2
D) 1, 2, 3

Ans: B
Feedback: 9.4.4
Difficulty: Medium

8. Belady's anomaly states that ____.

A) giving more memory to a process will improve its performance
B) as the number of allocated frames increases, the page-fault rate may decrease for all page
replacement algorithms
C) for some page replacement algorithms, the page-fault rate may decrease as the number of
allocated frames increases
D) for some page replacement algorithms, the page-fault rate may increase as the number of
allocated frames increases

Ans: D
Feedback: 9.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

9. Optimal page replacement ____.

A) is the page-replacement algorithm most often implemented
B) is used mostly for comparison with other page-replacement schemes
C) can suffer from Belady's anomaly
D) requires that the system keep track of previously used pages

Ans: B
Feedback: 9.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

10. In the enhanced second chance algorithm, which of the following ordered pairs represents a
page that would be the best choice for replacement?
A) (0,0)
B) (0,1)
C) (1,0)
D) (1,1)

Ans: A
Feedback: 9.4.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

11. The _____ allocation algorithm allocates available memory to each process according to its
size.
A) equal
B) global
C) proportional
D) slab

Ans: C
Feedback: 9.5.2
Difficulty: Easy

12. The ____ is the number of entries in the TLB multiplied by the page size.
A) TLB cache
B) page resolution
C) TLB reach
D) hit ratio

Ans: C
Feedback: 9.9.3
Difficulty: Easy

13. ________ allows the parent and child processes to initially share the same pages, but when
either process modifies a page, a copy of the shared page is created.
A) copy-on-write
B) zero-fill-on-demand
C) memory-mapped
D) virtual memory fork

Ans: A
Feedback: 9.3
Difficulty: Medium
14. _____ is the algorithm implemented on most systems.
A) FIFO
B) Least frequently used
C) Most frequently used
D) LRU

Ans: D
Feedback: 9.4
Difficulty: Medium

15. _____ occurs when a process spends more time paging than executing.
A) Thrashing
B) Memory-mapping
C) Demand paging
D) Swapping

Ans: A
Feedback: 9.6
Difficulty: Easy

16. Windows uses a local page replacement policy _____.

A) when a process exceeds its working set minimum
B) when a process exceeds its working set maximum
C) when the system undergoes automatic working set trimming
D) under all circumstances

Ans: B
Feedback: 9.10.1
Difficulty: Easy

17. Which of the following statements is false with regard to Solaris memory management?
A) The speed at which pages are examined (the scanrate) is constant.
B) The pageout process only runs if the number of free pages is less than lotsfree.
C) An LRU approximation algorithm is employed.
D) Pages selected for replacement may be reclaimed before being placed on the free list.

Ans: A
Feedback: 9.10.2
Difficulty: Medium

18. What size segment will be allocated for a 39 KB request on a system using the Buddy system
for kernel memory allocation?
A) 39 KB
B) 42 KB
C) 64 KB
D) None of the above

Ans: C
Feedback: 9.8.1
Difficulty: Easy

19. Which of the following statements is false with regard to allocating kernel memory?
A) Slab allocation does not suffer from fragmentation.
B) Adjacent segments can be combined into one larger segment with the buddy system.
C) Because the kernel requests memory of varying sizes, some of which may be quite small, the
system does not have to be concerned about wasting memory.
D) The slab allocator allows memory requests to be satisfied very quickly.

Ans: C
Feedback: 9.8
Difficulty: Medium

20. The _____ is an approximation of a program's locality.

A) locality model
B) working set
C) page fault frequency
D) page replacement algorithm

Ans: B
Feedback: 9.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

21. ______ allows a portion of a virtual address space to be logically associated with a file.
A) Memory-mapping
B) Shared memory
C) Slab allocation
D) Locality of reference

Ans: A
Feedback: 9.7
Difficulty: Medium

22. Systems in which memory access times vary significantly are known as __________.
A) memory-mapped I/O
B) demand-paged memory
C) non-uniform memory access
D) copy-on-write memory

Ans: C
Feedback: 9.5.4
Difficulty: Medium

23. Which of the following is considered a benefit when using the slab allocator?
A) Memory is allocated using a simple power-of-2 allocator.
B) It allows kernel code and data to be efficiently paged.
C) It allows larger segments to be combined using coalescing.
D) There is no memory fragmentation.

Ans: D
Feedback: 9.8.2
Difficulty: Medium

Essay

24. Explain the distinction between a demand-paging system and a paging system with
swapping.

Ans: A demand-paging system is similar to a paging system with swapping where processes
reside in secondary memory. With demand paging, when a process is executed, it is swapped
into memory. Rather than swapping the entire process into memory, however, a lazy swapper is
used. A lazy swapper never swaps a page into memory unless that page will be needed. Thus, a
paging system with swapping manipulates entire processes, whereas a demand pager is
concerned with the individual pages of a process.
Feedback: 9.2
Difficulty: Difficult

25. Explain the sequence of events that happens when a page-fault occurs.

Ans: When the operating system cannot load the desired page into memory, a page-fault occurs.
First, the memory reference is checked for validity. In the case of an invalid request, the program
will be terminated. If the request was valid, a free frame is located. A disk operation is then
scheduled to read the page into the frame just found, update the page table, restart the instruction
that was interrupted because of the page fault, and use the page accordingly.
Feedback: 9.2
Difficulty: Medium

26. How is the effective access time computed for a demand-paged memory system?

Ans: In order to compute the effective access time, it is necessary to know the average memory
access time of the system, the probability of a page fault, and the time necessary to service a
page fault. The effective access time can then be computed using the formula:
effective access time = (1 – probability of page fault) * memory access time + probability of
page fault * page fault time.
Feedback: 9.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

27. How does the second-chance algorithm for page replacement differ from the FIFO page
replacement algorithm?

Ans: The second-chance algorithm is based on the FIFO replacement algorithm and even
degenerates to FIFO in its worst-case scenario. In the second-chance algorithm, a FIFO
replacement is implemented along with a reference bit. If the reference bit is set, then it is
cleared, the page's arrival time is set to the current time, and the program moves along in a
similar fashion through the pages until a page with a cleared reference bit is found and
subsequently replaced.
Feedback: 9.4
Difficulty: Medium

28. Explain the concept behind prepaging.

Ans: Paging schemes, such as pure demand paging, result in large amounts of initial page faults
as the process is started. Prepaging is an attempt to prevent this high level of initial paging by
bringing into memory, at one time, all of the pages that will be needed by the process.
Feedback: 9.9.1
Difficulty: Medium

29. Why doesn't a local replacement algorithm solve the problem of thrashing entirely?

Ans: With local replacement, if one process starts thrashing, it cannot steal frames from another
process and cause the latter to thrash as well. However, if processes are thrashing, they will be in
the queue for the paging device most of the time. The average service time for a page fault will
increase because of the longer average queue for the paging device. Thus, the effective access
time will increase, even for a process that is not thrashing.
Feedback: 9.6
Difficulty: Medium

30. Explain the difference between programmed I/O (PIO) and interrupt driven I/O.

Ans: To send out a long string of bytes through a memory-mapped serial port, the CPU writes
one data byte to the data register to signal that it is ready for the next byte. If the CPU uses
polling to watch the control bit, constantly looping to see whether the device is ready, this
method of operation is called programmer I/O. If the CPU does not poll the control bit, but
instead receives an interrupt when the device is ready for the next byte, the data transfer is said to
be interrupt driven.
Feedback: 9.7.3
Difficulty: Medium

31. What are the benefits of using slab allocation to allocate kernel memory?

Ans: The slab allocator provides two main benefits. First, no memory is wasted due to
fragmentation. When the kernel requests memory for an object, the slab allocator returns the
exact amount of memory required to represent the object. Second, memory requests can be
satisfied quickly. Objects are created in advance and can be quickly allocated. Also, released
objects are returned to the cache and marked as free, thus making them immediately available for
subsequent requests.
Feedback: 9.8.2
Difficulty: Medium

32. How are lock bits useful in I/O requests?

Ans: A lock bit is associated with every frame. If a frame is locked, it cannot be selected for
replacement. To write a block on tape, we lock into memory the pages containing the block. The
system then continues as usual with other processes if the I/O request is in a queue for that I/O
device. This avoids the replacement of the pages for other processes and the possible
unavailability of those pages when the I/O request advances to the head of the device queue.
When the I/O is complete, the pages are unlocked.
Feedback: 9.9.6
Difficulty: Medium

33. Explain how copy-on-write operates.

Ans: Copy-on-write (COW) initially allows a parent and child process to share the same pages.
As long as either process is only reading—and not modifying—the shared pages, both processes
can share the same pages, thus increasing system efficiency. However, as soon as either process
modifies a shared page, a copy of that shared page is created, thus providing each process with
its own private page. For example, assume an integer X whose value is 5 is in a shared page
marked as COW. The parent process then proceeds to modify X, changing its value to 10. Since
this page is marked as COW, a copy of the page is created for the parent process, which changes
the value of X to 10. The value of X remains at 5 for the child process.
Feedback: 9.3
Difficulty: Medium

34. Explain the distinction between global allocation versus local allocation.

Ans: When a process incurs a page fault, it must be allocated a new frame for bringing the
faulting page into memory. The two general strategies for allocating a new frame are global and
local allocation policies. In a global allocation scheme, a frame is allocated from any process in
the system. Thus, if process A incurs a page fault, it may be allocated a page from process B.
The page that is selected from process B may be based upon any of the page replacement
algorithms such as LRU. Alternatively, a local allocation policy dictates that when a process
incurs a page fault, it must select one of its own pages for replacement when allocating a new
page.
Feedback: 9.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

35. Discuss two strategies for increasing TLB reach.

Ans: TLB reach refers to the amount of memory accessible from the TLB and is the page size
multiplied by the number of entries in the TLB. Two possible approaches for increasing TLB
reach are (1) increasing the number of entries in the TLB, and (2) increasing the page size.
Increasing the number of entries in the TLB is a costly strategy as the TLB consists of
associative memory, which is both costly and power hungry. For example, by doubling the
number of entries in the TLB, the TLB reach is doubled. However, increasing the page size (or
providing multiple page sizes) allows system designers to maintain the size of the TLB, and yet
significantly increase the TLB reach. For this reason, recent trends have moved towards
increasing page sizes for increasing TLB reach.
Feedback: 9.9.3
Difficulty: Medium

36. What is the benefit of using sparse addresses in virtual memory?

Ans: Virtual address spaces that include holes between the heap and stack are known as sparse
address spaces. Using a sparse address space is beneficial because the holes can be filled as the
stack or heap segments grow, or when we wish to dynamically link libraries (or possibly other
shared objects) during program execution.
Feedback: 9.1
Difficulty: Medium

37. Explain the usefulness of a modify bit.

Ans: A modify bit is associated with each page frame. If a frame is modified (i.e. written), the
modify bit is then set. The modify bit is useful when a page is selected for replacement. If the bit
is not set (the page was not modified), the page does not need to be written to disk. If the modify
bit is set, the page needs to be written to disk when selected for replacement.
Feedback: 9.4.1
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

38. In general, virtual memory decreases the degree of multiprogramming in a system.

Ans: False
Feedback: 9.1
Difficulty: Easy
39. Stack algorithms can never exhibit Belady's anomaly.

Ans: True
Feedback: 9.4
Difficulty: Medium

40. If the page-fault rate is too high, the process may have too many frames.

Ans: False
Feedback: 9.6
Difficulty: Medium

41. The buddy system for allocating kernel memory is very likely to cause fragmentation within
the allocated segments.

Ans: True
Feedback: 9.8.1
Difficulty: Easy

42. On a system with demand-paging, a process will experience a high page fault rate when the
process begins execution.

Ans: True
Feedback: 9.2
Difficulty: Easy

43. On systems that provide it, vfork() should always be used instead of fork().

Ans: False
Feedback: 9.3
Difficulty: Medium

44. Only a fraction of a process's working set needs to be stored in the TLB.

Ans: False
Feedback: 9.9.3
Difficulty: Medium

45. Solaris uses both a local and global page replacement policy.

Ans: False
Feedback: 9.10.2
Difficulty: Easy

46. Windows uses both a local and global page replacement policy.

Ans: False
Feedback: 9.10.3
Difficulty: Easy

47. A page fault must be preceded by a TLB miss.

Ans: True
Feedback: 9.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

48. Non-uniform memory access has little effect on the performance of a virtual memory system.

Ans: False
Feedback: 9.5.4
Difficulty: Medium

49. In Linux, a slab may only be either full or empty.

Ans: False
Feedback: 9.8.2
Difficulty: Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 10

Multiple Choice

1. The surface of a magnetic disk platter is divided into ____.

A) sectors
B) arms
C) tracks
D) cylinders

Ans: C
Feedback: 10.1.1.
Difficulty: Easy

2. On media that uses constant linear velocity, the ____.

A) disk's rotation speed increases as the head moves towards the middle of the disk from either
side
B) disk's rotation speed remains constant
C) density of bits decreases from the inner tracks to the outer tracks
D) density of bits per track is uniform

Ans: D
Feedback: 10.2
Difficulty: Difficult

3. The SSTF scheduling algorithm ____.

A) services the request with the maximum seek time
B) services the request with the minimum seek time
C) chooses to service the request furthest from the current head position
D) None of the above
Ans: B
Feedback: 10.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

4. Consider a disk queue holding requests to the following cylinders in the listed order: 116, 22,
3, 11, 75, 185, 100, 87. Using the SCAN scheduling algorithm, what is the order that the requests
are serviced, assuming the disk head is at cylinder 88 and moving upward through the cylinders?
A) 116 - 22 - 3 - 11 - 75 - 185 - 100 - 87
B) 100 - 116 - 185 - 87 - 75 - 22 - 11 - 3
C) 87 - 75 - 100 - 116 - 185 - 22 - 11 - 3
D) 100 - 116 - 185 - 3 - 11 - 22 - 75 - 87

Ans: B
Feedback: 10.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

5. Consider a disk queue holding requests to the following cylinders in the listed order: 116, 22,
3, 11, 75, 185, 100, 87. Using the FCFS scheduling algorithm, what is the order that the requests
are serviced, assuming the disk head is at cylinder 88 and moving upward through the cylinders?
A) 116 - 22 - 3 - 11 - 75 - 185 - 100 - 87
B) 100 - 116 - 185 - 87 - 75 - 22 - 11 - 3
C) 87 - 75 - 100 - 116 - 185 - 22 - 11 - 3
D) 100 - 116 - 185 - 3 - 11 - 22 - 75 – 87

Ans: A
Feedback: 10.4.1
Difficulty: Easy

6. Consider a disk queue holding requests to the following cylinders in the listed order: 116, 22,
3, 11, 75, 185, 100, 87. Using the SSTF scheduling algorithm, what is the order that the requests
are serviced, assuming the disk head is at cylinder 88 and moving upward through the cylinders?
A) 116 - 22 - 3 - 11 - 75 - 185 - 100 - 87
B) 100 - 116 - 185 - 87 - 75 - 22 - 11 - 3
C) 87 - 75 - 100 - 116 - 185 - 22 - 11 - 3
D) 100 - 116 - 185 - 3 - 11 - 22 - 75 - 87

Ans: C
Feedback: 10.4.2
Difficulty: Medium
7. Consider a disk queue holding requests to the following cylinders in the listed order: 116, 22,
3, 11, 75, 185, 100, 87. Using the C-SCAN scheduling algorithm, what is the order that the
requests are serviced, assuming the disk head is at cylinder 88 and moving upward through the
cylinders?
A) 116 - 22 - 3 - 11 - 75 - 185 - 100 - 87
B) 100 - 116 - 185 - 87 - 75 - 22 - 11 - 3
C) 87 - 75 - 100 - 116 - 185 - 22 - 11 - 3
D) 100 - 116 - 185 - 3 - 11 - 22 - 75 - 87

Ans: D
Feedback: 10.4.4
Difficulty: Medium

8. Low-level formatting ____.

A) does not usually provide an error-correcting code
B) is usually performed by the purchaser of the disk device
C) is different from physical formatting
D) divides a disk into sections that the disk controller can read and write

Ans: D
Feedback: 10.2
Difficulty: Medium

9. Host-attached storage is ____.

A) a special purpose storage system that is accessed remotely over a data network
B) not suitable for hard disks
C) accessed via local I/O ports
D) not suitable for use in raid arrays

Ans: C
Feedback: 10.3.1
Difficulty: Medium

10. Swap space management ____.

A) is a high-level operating system task
B) tries to provide the best throughput for the virtual memory system
C) is primarily used to increase the reliability of data in a system
D) None of the above
Ans: B
Feedback: 10.6
Difficulty: Medium

11 A RAID structure ____.

A) is primarily used for security reasons
B) is primarily used to ensure higher data reliability
C) stands for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks
D) is primarily used to decrease the dependence on disk drives

Ans: B
Feedback: 10.7
Difficulty: Medium

12. RAID level ____ is the most common parity RAID system.
A) 0
B) 0+1
C) 4
D) 5

Ans: D
Feedback: 10.7
Difficulty: Medium

13. Which of the following disk head scheduling algorithms does not take into account the
current position of the disk head?
A) FCFS
B) SSTF
C) SCAN
D) LOOK

Ans: A
Feedback: 10.4
Difficulty: Easy

14. The location where Windows places its boot code is the _____.
A) boot block
B) master boot record (MBR)
C) boot partition
D) boot disk

Ans: B
Feedback: 10.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

15. What are the two components of positioning time?

A) seek time + rotational latency
B) transfer time + transfer rate
C) effective transfer rate - transfer rate
D) cylinder positioning time + disk arm positioning time

Ans: A
Feedback: 10.1
Difficulty: Medium

16. Which of the following statements is false?

A) Swapping works in conjunction with virtual memory techniques.
B) Some systems allow for multiple swap spaces (disks).
C) Solaris only swaps pages of anonymous memory.
D) Typically, entire processes are swapped into memory.

Ans: D
Feedback: 10.6
Difficulty: Medium

17. _____ is a technique for managing bad blocks that maps a bad sector to a spare sector.
A) Sector slipping
B) Sector sparing
C) Bad block mapping
D) Hard error management

Ans: B
Feedback: 10.5.3
Difficulty: Medium
18. Which RAID level is best for storing large volumes of data?
A) RAID levels 0 + 1 and 1 + 0
B) RAID level 3
C) RAID level 4
D) RAID level 5

Ans: D
Feedback: 10.7.4
Difficulty: Medium

19. A _____ is a private network connecting servers and storage units.

A) host-attached storage
B) network-attached storage
C) storage-area network
D) private-area network

Ans: C
Feedback: 10.3
Difficulty: Medium

20. Which of the following statements regarding solid state disks (SSDs) is false?
A) They generally consume more power than traditional hard disks.
B) They have the same characteristics as magnetic hard disks, but can be more reliable.
C) They are generally more expensive per megabyte than traditional hard disks.
D) They have no seek time or latency.

Ans: A
Feedback: 10.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

21. Solid state disks (SSDs) commonly use the ___________ disk scheduling policy.
A) SSTF
B) SCAN
C) FCFS
D) LOOK

Ans: C
Feedback: 10.4
Difficulty: Medium
Essay

22. What is constant angular velocity in relation to disk drives?

Ans: If the rotation speed of a disk is to remain constant, the density of the bits must be
changed for different tracks to ensure the same rate of data moving under the head. This method
keeps a constant angular velocity on the disk.
Feedback: 10.2
Difficulty: Medium

23. What is a storage-area network?

Ans: A storage-area network (SAN) is a private network (using storage protocols rather than
networking protocols) connecting servers and storage units. The power of a SAN lies in its
flexibility. Multiple hosts and multiple storage arrays can attach to the same SAN, and storage
can be dynamically allocated to hosts.
Feedback: 10.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

24. What is a disadvantage of the SSTF scheduling algorithm?

Ans: Although the SSTF algorithm is a substantial improvement over the FCFS algorithm, it is
not optimal. SSTF may cause starvation of some requests. If a continual stream of requests
arrives near one another, a request of a cylinder far away from the head position has to wait
indefinitely.
Feedback: 10.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

25. What is the advantage of LOOK over SCAN disk head scheduling?

Ans: The LOOK algorithm is a type of SCAN algorithm. The difference is that, instead of
forcing the disk head to fully traverse the disk, as is done in the SCAN algorithm, the disk head
moves only as far as the final request in each direction.
Feedback: 10.4.5
Difficulty: Medium
26. What are the factors influencing the selection of a disk-scheduling algorithm?

Ans: Performance of a scheduling algorithm depends heavily on the number and types of
requests. Requests for disk service can be greatly influenced by the file-allocation method. The
location of directories and index blocks is also important. Other considerations for scheduling
may involve rotational latency (instead of simply seek distances) and operating system
constraints, such as demand paging.
Feedback: 10.4.5
Difficulty: Medium

27. Describe one technique that can enable multiple disks to be used to improve data transfer
rate.

Ans: One technique is bit-level striping. Bit-level striping consists of splitting the bits of each
byte across multiple disks so that the data can be accessed from multiple disks in parallel.
Another method is block-level striping where blocks of a file are striped across multiple disks.
Feedback: 10.7.2
Difficulty: Difficult

28. Describe an approach for managing bad blocks.

Ans: One approach to managing bad blocks is sector sparing. When the disk controller detects a
bad sector, it reports it to the operating system. The operating system will then replace the bad
sector with a spare sector. Whenever the bad sector is requested, the operating system will
translate the request to the spare sector.
Feedback: 10.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

29. Describe why Solaris systems only allocate swap space when a page is forced out of main
memory, rather than when the virtual memory page is first created.

Ans: Solaris systems only allocate swap space when a page is force out of main memory,
because modern computers typically have much more physical memory than older systems
and—as a result—page less frequently. A second reason is that Solaris only swaps anonymous
pages of memory.
Feedback: 10.6.3
Difficulty: Medium
30. Describe how ZFS uses checksums to maintain the integrity of data.

Ans: ZFS maintains checksums of all data and metadata blocks. When the file system detects a
bad checksum for a block, it replaces the bad block with a mirrored block that has a valid
checksum.
Feedback: 10.7.6
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

31. Disk controllers do not usually have a built-in cache.

Ans: False
Feedback: 10.1.1
Difficulty: Medium

32. In Solaris, swap space is only used as a backing store for pages of anonymous memory.

Ans: True
Feedback: 10.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

33. In asynchronous replication, each block is written locally and remotely before the write is
considered complete.

Ans: False
Feedback: 12.7
Difficulty: Difficult

34. Solid state disks (SSDs) commonly use the FCFS disk scheduling algorithm.

Ans: True
Feedback: 10.4
Difficulty: Easy
35. In most RAID implementations, a hot spare disk is not used for data, but is configured for
replacement should any other disk fail.

Ans: True
Feedback: 10.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

36. LOOK disk head scheduling offers no practical benefit over SCAN disk head scheduling.

Ans: False
Feedback: 10.4.5
Difficulty: Difficult

37. Windows allows a hard disk to be divided into one or more partitions

Ans: True
Feedback: 10.5.2
Difficulty: Easy

38. RAID level 0 provides no redundancy.

Ans: True
Feedback: 10.7.3
Difficulty: Easy

39. Data striping provides reliability for RAID systems.

Ans: False
Feedback: 10.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

40. In general, LOOK disk head scheduling will involve less movement of the disk heads than
SCAN disk head scheduling.
Ans: True
Feedback: 10.4
Difficulty: Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 11

Multiple Choice

1. A(n) ____ file is a sequence of functions.

A) text
B) source
C) object
D) executable

Ans: B
Feedback: 11.1
Difficulty: Easy

2. A(n) ____ file is a sequence of bytes organized into blocks understandable by the system's
linker.
A) text
B) source
C) object
D) executable

Ans: C
Feedback: 11.1
Difficulty: Easy

3. A(n) ____ file is a series of code sections that the loader can bring into memory and execute.
A) text
B) source
C) object
D) executable
Ans: D
Feedback: 11.1
Difficulty: Easy

4. In an environment where several processes may open the same file at the same time, ____.
A) the operating system typically uses only one internal table to keep track of open files
B) the operating system typically uses two internal tables called the system-wide and per-disk
tables to keep track of open files
C) the operating system typically uses three internal tables called the system-wide, per-disk,
and per-partition tables to keep track of open files
D) the operating system typically uses two internal tables called the system-wide and
per-process tables to keep track of open files

Ans: D
Feedback: 11.1
Difficulty: Medium

5. Suppose that the operating system uses two internal tables to keep track of open files.
Process A has two files open and process B has three files open. Two files are shared between
the two processes. How many entries are in the per-process table of process A, the per-process
table of process B, and the system-wide tables, respectively?
A) 5, 5, 5
B) 2, 3, 3
C) 2, 3, 5
D) 2, 3, 1

Ans: B
Feedback: 11.1
Difficulty: Difficult

6. A shared lock ____.

A) behaves like a writer lock
B) ensures that a file can have only a single concurrent shared lock
C) behaves like a reader lock
D) will prevent all other processes from accessing the locked file

Ans: C
Feedback: 11.1
Difficulty: Easy
7. An exclusive lock ____.
A) behaves like a writer lock
B) ensures that a file can have only a single concurrent shared lock
C) behaves like a reader lock
D) will prevent all other processes from accessing the locked file

Ans: A
Feedback: 11.1
Difficulty: Easy

8. The simplest file access method is ____.

A) sequential access
B) logical access
C) relative access
D) direct access

Ans: A
Feedback: 11.2.1
Difficulty: Easy

9. A _____ is used on UNIX systems at the beginning of some files to roughly indicate the type
of the file.
A) file extension
B) creator name
C) hint
D) magic number

Ans: D
Feedback: 11.1.3
Difficulty: Medium

10. Which of the following is true of the direct-access method?

A) It is the most common mode of access.
B) It allows programs to read and write records in no particular order.
C) Files are made up of variable-length records.
D) It is not a good method for accessing large amounts of data quickly.

Ans: B
Feedback: 11.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

11. Which of the following is true of the tree-structured directory structure?

A) Users cannot create their own subdirectories.
B) Users cannot acquire permission to access the files of other users.
C) Directories can share subdirectories and files.
D) It is the most common directory structure.

Ans: D
Feedback: 11.3.5
Difficulty: Medium

12. An acyclic-graph directory structure ____.

A) does not allow the sharing of files.
B) allows the sharing of subdirectories and files.
C) is less complicated than a simple tree-structured directory structure.
D) is less flexible than a simple tree-structured directory structure.

Ans: B
Feedback: 11.3.6
Difficulty: Medium

13. The path name /home/people/os-student/chap11.txt is an example of

A) a relative path name
B) an absolute path name
C) a relative path name to the current directory of /home
D) an invalid path name

Ans: B
Feedback: 11.3.5
Difficulty: Medium

14. The UNIX file system uses which of the following consistency semantics?
A) Writes to an open file by a user are not visible immediately to other users that have the file
open at the same time.
B) Once a file is closed, the changes made to it are visible only in sessions starting later.
C) Users are not allowed share the pointer of current location into the file.
D) Writes to an open file by a user are visible immediately to other users that have the file open
at the same time.

Ans: D
Feedback: 11.5.3
Difficulty: Difficult

15. Which of the following is a key property of an immutable file?

A) The file name may not be reused.
B) The contents of the file may be altered.
C) It is difficult to implement in a distributed system.
D) The file name may be reused.

Ans: A
Feedback: 11.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

16. Which of the following is not considered a classification of users in connection with each
file?
A) owner
B) current user
C) group
D) universe

Ans: B
Feedback: 11.6.2
Difficulty: Easy

17. ______ is a secure, distributed naming mechanism.

A) Lightweight directory-access protocol (LDAP)
B) Domain name system (DNS)
C) Common internet file system (CIFS)
D) Network information service (NIS)

Ans: A
Feedback: 11.5
Difficulty: Medium
18. app.exe is an example of a(n) _____.
A) batch file
B) object file
C) executable file
D) text file

Ans: C
Feedback: 11.1.3
Difficulty: Easy

19. A mount point is _____.

A) a root of the file system
B) a location of a shared file system
C) only appropriate for shared file systems
D) the location within the file structure where the file system is to be attached.

Ans: D
Feedback: 11.4
Difficulty: Medium

20. ________ is/are not considered a difficulty when considering file sharing.
A) Reliability
B) Multiple users
C) Consistency semantics
D) Remote access

Ans: A
Feedback: 11.5
Difficulty: Medium

21. Which of the following is not considered a file attribute?

A) Name
B) Size
C) Resolution
D) Protection

Ans: C
Feedback: 11.1.1
Difficulty: Easy
22. The path name os-student/src/vm.c is an example of
A) a relative path name
B) an absolute path name
C) a relative path name to the current directory of /os-student
D) an invalid path name

Ans: A
Feedback: 11.3.5
Difficulty: Medium

23. Which of the following statements regarding the client-server model is true?
A) A remote file system may be mounted.
B) The client-server relationship is not very common with networked machines.
C) A client may only use a single server.
D) The client and server agree on which resources will be made available by servers.

Ans: A
Feedback: 11.5.2
Difficulty: Medium

Essay

24. If you were creating an operating system to handle files, what would be the six basic file
operations that you should implement?

Ans: The six basic file operations include: creating a file, writing a file, reading a file,
repositioning within a file, deleting a file, and truncating a file. These operations comprise the
minimal set of required file operations.
Feedback: 11.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

25. What are common attributes that an operating system keeps track of and associates with a
file?

Ans: The attributes of the file are: 1) the name—the human-readable name of the file, 2) the
identifier—the non-human-readable tag of the file, 3) the type of the file, 4) the location of the
file, 5) the file's size (in bytes, words, or blocks), and possibly the maximum allowed size, 6) file
protection through access control information, and 7) time, date, and user identification.
Feedback: 11.1.1
Difficulty: Medium

26. Distinguish between an absolute path name and a relative path name.

Ans: An absolute path name begins at the root and follows a path of directories down to the
specified file, giving the directory names on the path. An example of an absolute path name is
/home/osc/chap11/file.txt. A relative path name defines a path from the current
directory. If the current directory is /home/osc/, then the relative path name of
chap11/file.txt refers to the same file as in the example of the absolute path name.
Feedback: 11.3.5
Difficulty: Medium

27. What is the difference between an operating system that implements mandatory locking and
one that implements advisory file locking?

Ans: Mandatory locking requires that the operating system not allow access to any file that is
locked, until it is released, even if the program does not explicitly ask for a lock on the file. An
advisory file locking scheme will not prevent access to a locked file, and it is up to the
programmer to ensure that locks are appropriately acquired and released.
Feedback: 11.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

28. What are the advantages of using file extensions?

Ans: File extensions allow the user of the computer system to quickly know the type of a file by
looking at the file's extension. The operating system can use the extension to determine how to
handle a particular file.
Feedback: 11.1.3
Difficulty: Medium

29. Briefly explain the functionality of extended file attributes.

Ans: File attributes are general values representing the name of a file, its owner, size, and
permissions (to name a few.) Extended file attributes refer to additional file attributes such as
character encoding, security features, and application associated with opening the file.
Feedback: 11.1.4
Difficulty: Medium

30. Why do all file systems suffer from internal fragmentation?

Ans: Disk space is always allocated in fixed sized blocks. Whenever a file is written to disk, it
usually does not fit exactly within an integer number of blocks so that a portion of a block is
wasted when storing the file onto the device.
Feedback: 11.1.5
Difficulty: Medium

31. Describe three common methods for remote file-sharing.

Ans: The first implemented method involves manually transferring files between machines via
programs like ftp. The second major method uses a distributed file system (DFS), in which
remote directories are visible from a local machine. In the third method, a browser is needed to
access remote files on the World Wide Web, and separate operations (essentially a wrapper for
ftp) are used to transfer files. The DFS method involves a much tighter integration between the
machine that is accessing the remote files and the machine providing the files.
Feedback: 11.5
Difficulty: Medium

32. Describe how the UNIX network file system (NFS) recovers from server failure in a remote
file system?

Ans: In the situation where the server crashes but must recognize that it has remotely mounted
exported file systems and opened files, NFS takes a simple approach, implementing a stateless
DFS. In essence, it assumes that a client request for a file read or write would not have occurred
unless the file system had been remotely mounted and the file had been previously open. The
NFS protocol carries all the information needed to locate the appropriate file and perform the
requested operation, assuming that the request was legitimate.
Feedback: 11.5.2
Difficulty: Difficult

33. What are the advantages and disadvantages of access control lists?

Ans: Access control lists have the advantage of enabling complex access methodologies. The
main problem with ACLs is their length. Constructing the list may be a tedious task. Space
management also becomes more complicated because the directory size needs to be of variable
size.
Feedback: 11.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

34. Windows systems employ mandatory locking.

Ans: True
Feedback: 11.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

35. As a general rule, UNIX systems employ mandatory locks.

Ans: False
Feedback: 11.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

36. All files in a single-level directory must have unique names.

Ans: True
Feedback: 11.3.3
Difficulty: Easy

37. A relative path name begins at the root.

Ans: False
Feedback: 11.3.5
Difficulty: Medium

38. An absolute path name must always begin at the root.

Ans: True
Feedback: 11.3.5
Difficulty: Medium

39. Typically, a mount point is an empty directory.

Ans: True
Feedback: 11.4
Difficulty: Medium

40. Windows does not provide access-control lists.

Ans: False
Feedback: 11.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

41. The most common approach to file protection is to make access dependent upon the identity
of the user.

Ans: True
Feedback: 11.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

42. On a UNIX system, writes to an open file are not immediately visible to other users who also
have the same file open.

Ans: False
Feedback: 11.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

43. A file on a Solaris system with permissions -rwx--x--x+ is an example of both

access-control lists as well as owner/group/universe protection.

Ans: True
Feedback: 11.6.2
Difficulty: Difficult
44. File system links may be to either absolute or relative path names.

Ans: True
Feedback: 11.3.6
Difficulty: Medium

45. A relative block number is an index relative to the beginning of a file.

Ans: True
Feedback: 11.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

46. Processes do not have a concept of a current directory.

Ans: False
Feedback: 11.3.5
Difficulty: Medium

47. An absolute path name cannot be a relative path name.

Ans: False
Feedback: 11.3.5
Difficulty: Difficult
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 12

Multiple Choice

1. Transfers between memory and disk are performed a ____.

A) byte at a time
B) file at a time
C) block at a time
D) sector at a time

Ans: C
Feedback: 12.1
Difficulty: Medium

2. Order the following file system layers in order of lowest level to highest level.

[1] I/O control

[2] logical file system
[3] basic file system
[4] file-organization module
[5] devices
A) 1, 3, 5, 4, 2
B) 5, 1, 3, 2, 4
C) 1, 5, 3, 4, 2
D) 5, 1, 3, 4, 2

Ans: D
Feedback: 12.1
Difficulty: Difficult

3. A volume control block ____.

A) can contain information needed by the system to boot an operating system from that
partition
B) is a directory structure used to organize the files
C) contains many of the file's details, including file permissions, ownership, size, and location
of the data blocks
D) contains information such as the number of blocks in a partition, size of the blocks, and
free-block and FCB count and pointers

Ans: D
Feedback: 12.2
Difficulty: Medium

4. Which of the following is the simplest method for implementing a directory?

A) tree data structure
B) linear list
C) hash table
D) nonlinear list

Ans: B
Feedback: 12.3.1
Difficulty: Medium

5. In the Linux VFS architecture, a(n) ____ object represents an individual file.
A) inode
B) file
C) superblock
D) dentry

Ans: A
Feedback: 12.2.3
Difficulty: Medium

6. Which of the following allocation methods ensures that only one access is needed to get a
disk block using direct access?
A) linked allocation
B) indexed allocation
C) hashed allocation
D) contiguous allocation

Ans: D
Feedback: 12.4.1
Difficulty: Medium

7. The free-space list can be implemented using a bit vector approach. Which of the following
is a drawback of this technique?
A) To traverse the list, each block must be read on the disk.
B) It is not feasible to keep the entire list in main memory for large disks.
C) The technique is more complicated than most other techniques.
D) This technique is not feasible for small disks.

Ans: B
Feedback: 12.5.1
Difficulty: Medium

8. Page caching ____.

A) uses virtual memory techniques to cache file data as system-oriented blocks as opposed to
pages
B) uses virtual memory techniques to cache file data as pages as opposed to system-oriented
blocks.
C) is used in Windows NT but not in Windows 2000.
D) cannot be used to cache both process pages and file data.

Ans: B
Feedback: 12.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

9. NFS views a set of interconnected workstations as a set of ____.

A) independent machines with independent file systems
B) dependent machines with independent file systems
C) dependent machines with dependent file systems
D) independent machines with dependent file systems

Ans: A
Feedback: 12.8
Difficulty: Medium

10. The NFS mount protocol ____.

A) does not allow a remote directory to be accessible in a transparent manner
B) exhibits a transitivity property in terms of client access to other file systems
C) establishes the initial logical connection between a server and a client
D) provides a set of RFCs for remote file operations

Ans: C
Feedback: 12.8.2
Difficulty: Medium

11. A disk with free blocks 0,1,5,9,15 would be represented with what bit map?
A) 0011101110111110
B) 1100010001000001
C) 0100010001000001
D) 1100010001000000

Ans: B
Feedback: 12.5.1
Difficulty: Medium

12. A _____ is a view of a file system before the last update took place.
A) transaction
B) backup
C) consistency checker
D) snapshot

Ans: D
Feedback: 12.7.3
Difficulty: Medium

13. ______ includes all of the file system structure, minus the actual contents of files.
A) Metadata
B) Logical file system
C) Basic file system
D) File-organization module

Ans: A
Feedback: 12.1
Difficulty: Medium
14. The file-allocation table (FAT) used in MS-DOS is an example of _____.
A) contiguous allocation
B) indexed allocation
C) linked allocation
D) multilevel index

Ans: C
Feedback: 12.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

15. How many disk accesses are necessary for direct access to byte 20680 using linked allocation
and assuming each disk block is 4 KB in size?
A) 1
B) 6
C) 7
D) 5

Ans: B
Feedback: 12.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

16. A contiguous chunk of disk blocks is known as a(n) _____.

A) extent
B) disk block group
C) inode
D) file-allocation table (FAT)

Ans: A
Feedback: 12.4.1
Difficulty: Medium

17. On UNIX systems, the data structure for maintaining information about a file is a(n) _____.
A) superblock
B) inode
C) file-control block (FCB)
D) master file table

Ans: B
Feedback: 12.1
Difficulty: Medium
18. Which algorithm is considered reasonable for managing a buffer cache?
A) least-recently-used (LRU)
B) first-in-first-out (FIFO)
C) most-recently-used
D) least-frequently-used (LFU)

Ans: A
Feedback: 12.6.2
Difficulty: Easy

19. Which of the following statements regarding the WAFL file system is incorrect?
A) Clones are similar to snapshots.
B) WAFL is used exclusively on networked file servers.
C) Part of caching uses non-volatile RAM (NVRAM.)
D) It provides little replication.

Ans: D
Feedback: 12.9
Difficulty: Medium

20. Consider a system crash on a log-structured file system. Which one of the following events
must occur?
A) Only aborted transactions must be completed.
B) All transactions in the log must be completed.
C) All transactions in the log must be marked as invalid.
D) File consistency checking must be performed.

Ans: B
Feedback: 12.7.2
Difficulty: Difficult

21. A __________ contains the same pages for memory-mapped IO as well as ordinary IO.
A) double cache
B) unified virtual memory
C) page cahce
D) unified buffer cache
Ans: D
Feedback: 12.6.2
Difficulty:

Essay

22. Briefly describe the in-memory structures that may be used to implement a file system.

Ans: An in-memory mount table contains information about each mounted volume. An
in-memory directory-structure cache holds the directory information of recently accessed
directories. The system-wide open-file table contains a copy of the FCB of each open file. The
per-process open-file table contains a pointer to the appropriate entry in the system-wide
open-file table.
Feedback: 12.2
Difficulty: Difficult

23. To create a new file, an application program calls the logical file system. Describe the steps
the logical file system takes to create the file.

Ans: The logical file system allocates a new FCB. Alternatively, if the file-system
implementation creates all FCBs at file-system creation time, an FCB is allocated from the set of
free FCBs. The system then reads the appropriate directory into memory, updates it with the new
file name and FCB, and writes it back to the disk.
Feedback: 12.2
Difficulty: Difficult

24. What do the terms "raw" and "cooked" mean when used to describe a partition?

Ans: A raw disk is used where no file system is appropriate. Raw partitions can be used for a
UNIX swap space as it does not need a file system. On the other hand, a cooked disk is a disk
that contains a file system.
Feedback: 12.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

25. What are the two most important functions of the Virtual File System (VFS) layer?
Ans: The VFS separates the file-system-generic operations from their implementation by
defining a clean VFS interface. Several of these implementations may coexist on the same
machine allowing transparent access to different types of locally mounted file systems. The other
important feature of VFS is that it is based on a file-representation structure that contains a
numerical designator for a network-wide unique file. This network-wide uniqueness is required
for support of network file systems.
Feedback: 12.2.3
Difficulty: Medium

26. What is the main disadvantage to using a linear list to implement a directory structure?
What steps can be taken to compensate for this problem?

Ans: Linear lists are slow to search. This slowness would be noticeable to users as directory
information is used frequently in computer systems. Many operating systems implement a
software cache to store the most recently used directory information. A sorted list may also be
used to decrease the average search time due to a binary search.
Feedback: 12.3.1
Difficulty: Medium

27. How is a hash table superior to a simple linear list structure? What issue must be handled by
a hash table implementation?

Ans: A hash table implementation uses a linear list to store directory entries. However, a hash
data structure is also used in order to speed up the search process. The hash data structure allows
the file name to be used to help compute the file's location within the linear list. Collisions,
which occur when multiple files map to the same location, must be handled by this
implementation.
Feedback: 12.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

28. What are the problems associated with linked allocation of disk space routines?

Ans: The major problem is that a linked allocation can be used effectively only for
sequential-access files. Another disadvantage is the space required for the pointers. Yet another
problem of linked allocation is the decreased reliability due to lost or damaged pointers.
Feedback: 12.4.2
Difficulty: Medium
29. Describe the counting approach to free space management.
Ans: The counting approach takes advantage of the fact that, generally, several contiguous
blocks may be allocated or freed simultaneously. Thus, rather than keeping a list of n free disk
addresses, we can keep the address of the first free block and the number n of free contiguous
blocks that follow the first block. Each entry in the free-space list then consists of a disk address
and a count.
Feedback: 12.5.4
Difficulty: Medium

30. Explain how a snapshot is taken in the WAFL file system.

Ans: To take a snapshot, WAFL creates a duplicate root inode. Any file or metadata updates
after that go to new blocks rather than overwriting their existing blocks. The new root inode
points to metadata and data changed as a result of these writes, while the old root inode still
points to the old blocks, which have not been updated.
Feedback: 12.9
Difficulty: Medium

31. Explain the benefit if using a unified buffer cache.

Ans: Without a unified buffer cache, memory-mapped IO uses a page cache, and ordinary IO
uses a buffer cache. The buffer cache will also cache the same contents as in the page cache.
This is known as double caching of file system data twice. A unified buffer cache uses the same,
single buffer cache for caching pages for both memory-mapped IO as well as ordinary IO.
Feedback: 12.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

32. Metadata includes all of the file-system structure, including the actual data (or contents of
the file).

Ans: False
Feedback: 12.1
Difficulty: Medium
33. In NTFS, the volume control block (per volume) and the directory structure (per file system)
is stored in the master file table.

Ans: True
Feedback: 12.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

34. Indexed allocation may require substantial overhead for its index block.

Ans: True
Feedback: 12.4.3
Difficulty: Medium

35. The NFS protocol provides concurrency-control mechanisms.

Ans: False
Feedback: 12.8
Difficulty: Medium

36. On log-structured file systems, all metadata and file data updates are written sequentially to a
log.

Ans: False
Feedback: 12.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

37. VFS allows dissimilar file systems to be accessed similarly.

Ans: True
Feedback: 12.2.3
Difficult: Medium

38. Linked allocation suffers from external fragmentation.

Ans: False
Feedback: 12.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

39. The WAFL file system can be used in conjunction with NFS.

Ans: True
Feedback: 12.9
Difficulty: Easy

40. On log-structured file systems, a transaction is considered only when it is written to disk.

Ans: False
Feedback: 12.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

41. A unified buffer cache uses the same cache for ordinary disk I/O as well as memory-mapped
I/O.

Ans: True
Feedback: 12.6.2
Difficulty: Medium

42. A consistency checker only checks for inconsistencies, it cannot fix any that it may find.

Ans: False
Feedback: 12.7.1
Difficulty: Easy

43. Asynchronous writes to a file system are generally more efficient than synchronous writes.

Ans: True
Feedback: 12.6.2
Difficulty: Medium
Chapter: Chapter 13

Multiple Choice

1. The ____ register of an I/O port can be written by the host to start a command or to change
the mode of a device.
A) status
B) control
C) data-in
D) transfer

Ans: B
Section: 13.2
Difficulty: Medium

2. An interrupt priority scheme can be used to ____.

A) allow the most urgent work to be finished first
B) make it possible for high-priority interrupts to preempt the execution of a low priority
interrupt
C) defer the handling of low-priority interrupt without masking off all interrupts
D) All of the above

Ans: D
Section: 13.2.2
Difficulty: Difficult

3. DMA controllers ____.

A) do not utilize an additional, special purpose, processor
B) are a nonstandard component in PCs of today
C) can steal memory access cycles from the main CPU
D) can access main memory at the same time as the main CPU
Ans: C
Section: 13.2.3
Difficulty: Medium

4. A character-stream device ____.

A) transfers data in blocks of bytes
B) transfers data a byte at a time
C) is a device such as a disk drive
D) is similar to a random access device

Ans: B
Section: 13.3
Difficulty: Easy

5. ____ I/O accesses a block device as a simple array of blocks.

A) Raw
B) Stream
C) Indirect
D) Cooked

Ans: A
Section: 13.3.1
Difficulty: Medium

6. Which of the following is true of a blocking system call?

A) The application continues to execute its code when the call is issued.
B) The call returns immediately without waiting for the I/O to complete.
C) The execution of the application is suspended when the call is issued.
D) Blocking application code is harder to understand than nonblocking application code

Ans: C
Section: 13.3.4
Difficulty: Difficult
7. A(n) ____ is a buffer that holds output for a device that cannot accept interleaved data
streams.
A) escape
B) block device
C) cache
D) spool

Ans: D
Section: 13.4.4
Difficulty: Medium

8. A sense key reports on the failure of a SCSI device by ____.

A) stating the general category of failure
B) stating the general nature of the failure
C) giving detailed information about the exact cause of failure
D) maintaining internal pages of error-log information

Ans: B
Section: 13.4.5
Difficulty: Medium

9. A(n) ____ is a front-end processor that multiplexes the traffic from hundreds of remote
terminals into one port on a large computer.
A) terminal concentrator
B) network daemon
C) I/O channel
D) context switch coordinator

Ans: A
Section: 13.7
Difficulty: Medium

10. Which of the following is a principle that can improve the efficiency of I/O?
A) Increase the number of context switches.
B) Use small data transfers
C) Move processing primitives into hardware
D) Decrease concurrency using DMA controllers

Ans: C
Section: 13.7
Difficulty: Difficult

Essay

11. Explain the concept of a bus and daisy chain. Indicate how they are related.

Ans: A bus is merely a set of wires and a rigidly defined protocol that specifies a set of
messages that can be sent on the wires. The messages are conveyed by patterns of electrical
voltages applied to the wires with defined timings. A daisy chain is a device configuration where
one device has a cable that connects another device which has a cable that connects another
device, and so on. A daisy chain usually operates as a bus.
Section: 13.2
Difficulty: Medium

12. Explain the difference between a serial-port controller and a SCSI bus controller.

Ans: A serial-port controller is a simple device controller with a single chip (or portion of a
chip) that controls the signals on the wires of a serial port. By contrast, a SCSI bus controller is
not simple. Because the SCSI protocol is complex, the SCSI bus controller is often
implemented as a separate circuit board that plugs into the computer.
Section: 13.2
Difficulty: Medium

13. Explain the concept of polling between a host and a controller.

Ans: When a host tries to access the controller, it constantly reads the status of a "busy register"
and waits for the register to clear. This repetitive checking is termed polling.
Section: 13.2.1
Difficulty: Medium
14. What is interrupt chaining?

Ans: Interrupt chaining is a technique in which each element in the interrupt vector points to the
head of a list of interrupt handlers. When an interrupt is raised, the handlers on the
corresponding list are called one by one, until one is found that can service the request. This is a
compromise between the overhead of a huge interrupt table and the inefficiency of dispatching to
a single interrupt handler.
Section: 13.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

15. Why is DMA used for devices that execute large transfers?

Ans: Without DMA, programmed I/O must be used. This involves using the CPU to watch
status bits and feed data into a controller register one byte at a time. Therefore, DMA was
developed to lessen the burden on the CPU. DMA uses a special-purpose processor called a
DMA controller and copies data in chunks.
Section: 13.2.3
Difficulty: Medium

16. What is the purpose of a programmable interval timer?

Ans: The programmable interval timer is hardware used to measure elapsed time and to trigger
operations. The scheduler uses this mechanism to generate an interrupt that will preempt a
process at the end of its time slice.
Section: 13.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

17. Give an example of when an application may need a nonblocking I/O system call.

Ans: If the user is viewing a web browser, then the application should allow keyboard and
mouse input while it is displaying information to the screen. If nonblocking is not used, then the
user would have to wait for the application to finish displaying the information on the screen
before allowing any kind of user interaction.
Section: 13.3.4
Difficulty: Medium

18. What are the three reasons that buffering is performed?

Ans: A buffer is a memory area that stores data while they are transferred between two devices
or between a device and an application. One reason for buffering is handle data when speed
mismatches between the producer and consumer of a data stream exist. The second reason is to
adapt between devices that have different data-transfer sizes. The third reason is to support copy
semantics for application I/O.
Section: 13.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

19. What is the purpose of a UNIX mount table?

Ans: The UNIX mount table associates prefixes of path names with specific device names. To
resolve a path name, UNIX looks up the name in the mount table to find the longest matching
prefix; the corresponding entry gives the device name.
Section: 13.5
Difficulty: Medium

20. UNIX System V implements a mechanism called STREAMS. What is this mechanism?

Ans: STREAMS enables an application to assemble pipelines of driver code dynamically. A
stream is a full-duplex connection between a device driver and a user-level process. It consists
of a stream head that interfaces with the user process and a driver end that controls the device. It
may also include stream modules between them.
Section: 13.6
Difficulty: Difficult

True/False

21. An expansion bus is used to connect relatively high speed devices to the main bus.
Ans: False
Section: 13.2
Difficulty: Medium

22. A maskable interrupt can never be disabled.

Ans: False
Section: 13.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

23. A dedicated device cannot be used concurrently by several processes or threads.

Ans: True
Section: 13.3
Difficulty: Easy

24. Although caching and buffering are distinct functions, sometimes a region of memory can
be used for both purposes.

Ans: True
Section: 13.4
Difficulty: Medium

25. STREAMS I/O is asynchronous except when the user process communicates with the
stream head.

Ans: True
Section: 13.6
Difficulty: Medium
26. Vectored IO allows one system call to perform multiple IO operations involving involving a
single location.

Ans: False
Section: 13.3.5
Difficulty: Medium
Chapter: Chapter 14

Multiple Choice

1. In the UNIX operating system, a domain is associated with the ____.

A) user
B) process
C) procedure
D) task

Ans: A
Section: 14.3.2
Difficulty: Easy

2. In MULTICS, the protection domains are organized in a _____.

A) star structure
B) linear structure
C) ring structure
D) directory structure

Ans: C
Section: 14.3.3
Difficulty: Easy

3. In an access matrix, the ____ right allows a process to change the entries in a row.
A) owner
B) copy
C) control.
D) switch

Ans: C
Section: 14.4
Difficulty: Medium

4. The ____ implementation of an access table consists of sets of ordered triples.

A) global table
B) access list for objects
C) lock-key mechanism
D) capability list

Ans: A
Section: 14.5.1
Difficulty: Easy

5. In capability lists, each object has a ____ to denote its type.

A) gate
B) tag
C) key
D) lock

Ans: B
Section: 14.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

6. Which of the following implementations of the access matrix is a compromise between two
other implementations listed below?
A) access list
B) capability list
C) global table
D) lock-key

Ans: D
Section: 14.5
Difficulty:Medium
7. In the reacquisition scheme for implementing the revocation of capabilities, ____.
A) a key is defined when the capability is created
B) the capabilities point indirectly, not directly, to the objects
C) a list of pointers is maintained with each object that point to all capabilities associated with
that object
D) capabilities are periodically deleted from each domain

Ans: D
Section: 14.7
Difficulty: Medium

8. Which of the following is an advantage of compiler-based enforcement of access control?

A) Protection schemes are programmed as opposed to simply declared.
B) Protection requirements are dependant of the facilities provided by a particular operating
system.
C) The means for enforcement needs to be provided by the designer of the subsystem.
D) Access privileges are closely related to the linguistic concept of a data type.

Ans: D
Section:14.9.1
Difficulty: Difficult

9. Which of the following is a true statement regarding the relative merits between access rights
enforcement based solely on a kernel as opposed to enforcement provided largely by a compiler?
A) Enforcement by the compiler provides a greater degree of security.
B) Enforcement by the kernel is less flexible than enforcement by the programming language
for user-defined policy.
C) Kernel-based enforcement has the advantage that static access enforcement can be verified
off-line at compile time.
D) The fixed overhead of kernel calls cannot often be avoided in a compiler-based enforcement.

Ans: B
Section: 14.9
Difficulty: Difficult

10. Which of the following is true of the Java programming language in relation to protection?
A) When a class is loaded, the JVM assigns the class to a protection domain that gives the
permissions of that class.
B) It does not support the dynamic loading of untrusted classes over a network.
C) It does not support the execution of mutually distrusting classes within the same JVM.
D) Methods in the calling sequence are not responsible for requests to access a protected
resource.

Ans: A
Section: 14.14.9.2
Difficulty: Medium

Essay

11. Explain the meaning of the term object as it relates to protection in a computer system.
What are the two general types of objects in a system?

Ans: A computer system is a collection of processes and objects. Each object has a unique
name that differentiates it from all other objects in the system, and each can be accessed only
through well-defined and meaningful operations. Objects are essentially abstract data types and
include hardware objects (such as the CPU, memory segments, printer, and disks) and software
objects (such as files, programs, and semaphores).
Section: 14.3
Difficulty: Medium

12. A process is said to operate within a protection domain which specifies the resources that the
process may access. List the ways that a domain can be realized.

Ans: A domain may be realized where each user, process, or procedure may be a domain. In the
first case, the set of objects that can be accessed depends on the identity of the user. In the
second case, the set of objects that can be accessed depends upon the identity of the process.
Finally, the third case specifies that the set of objects that can be accessed depends on the local
variables defined with the procedure.
Section: 14.3.1
Difficulty: Medium
13. What is an access matrix and how can it be implemented?

Ans: An access matrix is an abstract model of protection where the rows represent domains and
the columns represent objects. Each entry in the matrix consists of a set of access rights. Access
matrices are typically implemented using a global table, an access list for objects, a capability list
for domains, or a lock-key mechanism.
Section: 14.4
Difficulty: Difficult

14. What was the main disadvantage to the structure used to organize protection domains in the
MULTICS system?

Ans: The ring structure had the disadvantage in that it did not allow the enforcement of a need-
to-know principle. For example, if an object needed to be accessible in one domain, but not in
another, then the domain that required the privileged information needed to be located such that
it was in a ring closer to the center than the other domain. This also forced every object in the
outer domain to be accessible by the inner domain which is not necessarily desired.
Section: 14.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

15. Why is a global table implementation of an access matrix not typically implemented?

Ans: The global table implementation suffers from a couple of drawbacks that keep it from
being a popular implementation type. The first drawback is that the table is usually large and
cannot be stored in main memory. If the table cannot be stored in main memory, extra I/O must
be used to access this table. In addition, a global table makes it difficult to take advantage of
special groupings of objects or domains.
Section: 14.5.1
Difficulty: Medium

16. How does the lock-key mechanism for implementation of an access matrix work?

Ans: In a lock-key mechanism, each object is given a list of unique bit patterns, called locks.
Similarly, each domain has a list of unique bit patterns, called keys. A process in a domain can
only access an object if that domain has the matching key for the lock. Users are not allowed to
examine or modify the list of keys (or locks) directly.
Section: 14.5.4
Difficulty: Medium

17. What is a confinement problem?

Ans: A confinement problem is the problem of guaranteeing that no information initially held in
an object can migrate outside of its execution environment. Although copy and owner rights
provide a mechanism to limit the propagation of access rights, they do not provide appropriate
tools for preventing the propagation (or disclosure) of information. The confinement problem is
in general unsolvable.
Section: 14.4
Difficulty: Medium

18. What is rights amplification with respect to the Hydra protection system?

Ans: Rights amplification allows certification of a procedure as trustworthy to act on a formal

parameter of a specified type on behalf of any process that holds a right to execute the procedure.
The rights held by the trustworthy procedure are independent of, and may exceed, the rights held
by the calling process.
Section: 14.8.1
Difficulty: Medium

19. Describe the two kinds of capabilities in CAP.

Ans: Data capabilities only provide the standard read, write, and execute operations of the
individual storage segments associated with the object. Data capabilities are interpreted by the
microcode in the CAP machine. Software capabilities are protected, but not interpreted by the
CAP microcode. These capabilities are interpreted by a protected procedure which may be
written by an application programmer as part of a subsystem.
Section:
Difficulty:

20. Explain how Java provides protection through type safety.

Ans: Java's load-time and run-time checks enforce type safety of Java classes. Type safety
ensures that classes cannot treat integers as pointers, write past the end of an array, or otherwise
access memory in arbitrary ways. Rather, a program can access an object only via the methods
defined on that object by its class. This enables a class to effectively encapsulate its data and
methods from other classes loaded in the same JVM.
Section: 14.9.2
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

21. Domains may share access rights.

Ans: True
Section: 14.3.1
Difficulty: Medium

22. An access matrix is generally dense.

Ans: False
Section: 14.4
Difficulty: Medium

23. A capability list associated with a domain is directly accessible to a process executing in that
domain.

Ans: False
Section: 14.5.3
Difficulty: Medium

24. Most systems use a combination of access lists and capabilities.

Ans: True
Section: 14.5.5
Difficulty: Medium

25. The "key" scheme for implementing revocation allows selective revocation.

Ans: False
Section: 14.7
Difficulty: Medium
Chapter: Chapter 15

Multiple Choice

1. The most common method used by attackers to breach security is ____.

A) masquerading
B) message modification
C) session hijacking
D) phishing

Ans: A
Section: 15.1
Difficulty: Medium

2. A code segment that misuses its environment is called ____.

A) a backdoor
B) a trap door
C) a worm
D) a Trojan horse

Ans: D
Section: 15.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

3. Worms ____.
A) use the spawn mechanism to ravage system performance
B) can shut down an entire network
C) continue to grow as the Internet expands
D) All of the above

Ans: D
Section: 15.3.1
Difficulty: Easy

4. A denial of service attack is ____.

A) aimed at gaining information
B) aimed at stealing resources
C) aimed at disrupting legitimate use of a system
D) generally not network based

Ans: C
Section: 15.3.3
Difficulty: Medium

5. In a paired-password system, ____.

A) the user specifies two passwords
B) the computer supplies one part of a password and the user enters the other part
C) passwords must contain equal amounts of numbers and digits paired together
D) two users must enter their own separate password to gain access to the system

Ans: B
Section: 15.5.4
Difficulty: Medium

6. A ____ virus changes each time it is installed to avoid detection by antivirus software.
A) polymorphic
B) tunneling
C) multipartite
D) stealth

Ans: A
Section: 15.2.5
Difficulty: Medium

7. ____ is a symmetric stream cipher.

A) DES
B) AES
C) RC4
D) twofish

Ans: C
Section: 15.4.1
Difficulty: Difficult

8. A ____ is a public key digitally signed by a trusted party.

A) key ring
B) digital certificate
C) message digest
D) digital key

Ans: B
Section: 15.4
Difficulty: Difficult

9. ____ layer security generally has been standardized on IPSec.

A) Network
B) Transport
C) Data-link
D) Application

Ans: A
Section: 15.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

10. Which of the following is true of SSL?

A) It provides security at the data-link layer.
B) It is a simple protocol with limited options.
C) It is commonly used for secure communication on the Internet.
D) It was designed by Microsoft.

Ans: C
Section: 15.4.3
Difficulty: Medium
Essay

11. What are the four levels of security measures that are necessary for system protection?

Ans: To protect a system, security measures must take places at four levels: physical (machine
rooms, terminals, and workstations); human (user authorization, avoidance of social
engineering); operating system (protection against accidental and purposeful security breaches);
and network (leased, Internet, and wireless connections).
Section: 15.1
Difficulty: Medium

12. What is a trap door? Why is it problematic?

Ans: A trap door is an intentional hole left in software by the designer of a program or system. It
can allow circumvention of security features for those who know about the hole. Trap doors
pose a difficult problem because, to detect them, we have to analyze all the source code for all
components of a system.
Section: 15.15.2.2
Difficulty: Medium

13. How does a virus differ from a worm?

Ans: A worm is structured as a complete, standalone program whereas a virus is a fragment of

code embedded in a legitimate program.
Section: 15.3
Difficulty: Difficult

14. What is the most common way for an attacker outside of the system to gain unauthorized
access to the target system?
Ans: The stack- or buffer-overflow attack is the most common way for an attacker outside the
system to gain unauthorized access to a system. This attack exploits a bug in the software in
order to overflow some portion of the program and cause the execution of unauthorized code.
Section: 15.2.4
Difficulty: Medium

15. What are the two main methods used for intrusion detection?

Ans: The two most common methods employed are signature-based detection and anomaly
detection. In signature-based detection, system input or network traffic is examined for specific
behavior patterns known to indicate attacks. In anomaly detection, one attempts, through various
techniques, to detect anomalous behavior within computer systems.
Section: 15.6.3
Difficulty: Medium

16. What is port scanning and how is it typically launched?

Ans: Port scanning is not an attack but rather is a means for a cracker to detect a system's
vulnerabilities to attack. Port scanning typically is automated, involving a tool that attempts to
create a TCP/IP connection to a specific port or a range of ports. Because port scans are
detectable, they are frequently launched from zombie systems.
Section: 15.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

17. What role do keys play in modern cryptography?

Ans: Modern cryptography is based on secrets called keys that are selectively distributed to
computers in a network and used to process messages. Cryptography enables a recipient of a
message to verify that the message was created by some computer possessing a certain key - the
key is the source of the message. Similarly, a sender can encode its message so that only a
computer with a certain key can decode the message, so that the key becomes the destination.
Section: 15.4
Difficulty: Difficult
18. What is the difference between symmetric and asymetric encryption?

Ans: In a symmetric encryption algorithm, the same key is used to encrypt and to decrypt. In an
asymetric encryption algorithm, there are different encryption and decryption keys. Asymmetric
encryption is based on mathematical functions instead of the transformations used in symmetric
encryption, making it much more computationally expensive to execute.
Section: 15.4.1
Difficulty: Difficult

19. What are the two main varieties of authentication algorithms?

Ans: The first type of authentication algorithm, a message-authentication code (MAC), uses
symmetric encryption. In MAC, a cryptographic checksum is generated from the message using
a secret key. The second type of authentication algorithm, a digital-signature algorithm, uses a
public and private key. The authenticators thus produced are called digital signatures.
Section: 15.4.1
Difficulty: Difficult

20. What is the practice of safe computing? Give two examples.

Ans: The best practice against computer viruses is prevention, or the practice of safe computing.
Purchasing unopened software from vendors and avoiding free or pirated copies from public
sources or disk exchange offer the safest route to preventing infection. Another defense is to
avoid opening any e-mail attachments from unknown users.
Section: 15.6.4
Difficulty: Easy

True/False

21. It is easier to protect against malicious misuse than against accidental misuse.

Ans: False
Section: 15.1
Difficulty: Medium

22. Spyware is not considered a crime in most countries.

Ans: True
Section: 15.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

23. Biometric devices are currently too large and expensive to be used for normal computer
authentication.

Ans: True
Section: 15.5.5
Difficulty: Easy

24. Tripwire can distinguish between an authorized and an unauthorized change.

Ans: False
Section: 15.6
Difficulty: Medium

25. Generally, it is impossible to prevent denial-of-service attacks.

Ans: True
Section: 15.3.3
Difficulty: Medium
Import Settings:
Base Settings: Brownstone Default
Highest Answer Letter: D
Multiple Keywords in Same Paragraph: No

Chapter: Chapter 16

Multiple Choice

1. In a virtual machine, each program believes that it has ____.

A) multiple processors
B) its own memory
C) another "virtual" computer to assist in its operations
D) more memory than is physically available on the machine

Ans: B
Feedback: 16.1
Difficulty: Medium

2. ____ is a popular commercial application that abstracts Intel 80XXx86 hardware into
isolated virtual machines.
A) .NET
B) JIT
C) JVM
D) VMware

Ans: D
Feedback: 16.7.1
Difficulty: Easy

3. _____ is not an example of a benefit of virtual machines.

A) The ability to run several different operating systems that all share the same hardware
B) The ability to concurrently run several different operating systems
C) Uses less physical memory than an actual operating system
D) Protects the host system from guest operating systems
Ans: C
Feedback: 16.3
Difficulty: Easy

4. ______ tricks an application by having it think it is the only process on the system.
A) Paravirtualization
B) Simulation
C) The Java virtual machine
D) The .NET framework

Ans: A
Feedback: 16.5.5
Difficulty: Medium

5. _________ allows a virtual machine to behave as if it is acting in kernel mode.

A) Paravirtualization
B) Live migration
C) Trap-and-emulate
D) The Java virtual machine

Ans: C
Feedback: 16.4.1
Difficulty: Medium

6. Microsoft .NET and the Java virtual machine are examples of __________.
A) Paravirtualization
B) Programming environment virtualization
C) Emulators
D) Type 0 hypervisors

Ans: B
Feedback: 16.1
Difficulty: Difficult

7. Which of the following statements regarding a virtual CPU (VCPU) is considered false?
A) The VCPU does not execute code.
B) It represents the state of the physical CPU.
C) Each guest shares the VCPU.
D) The VCPU is found in most virtualization options.

Ans: C
Feedback: 16.4
Difficulty: Difficult

8. _________ allows for virtualization on systems that do not have a clean separation between
privileged and non-privileged instructions.
A) Binary translation
B) Trap-and-emulate
C) Application containment
D) Paravirtualization

Ans: A
Feedback: 16.4.2
Difficulty: Difficult

9. Which of the following statements regarding nested page tables (NPTs) is false?
A) They are used to represent the guest's page table state.
B) NPTs are used for both trap-and-emulate and binary translation.
C) NPTs reduce the number of TLB misses.
D) Each guest operating system maintains its own NPT.

Ans: C
Feedback: 16.4.2
Difficulty: Difficult

10. _________ occurs when a virtual machine is configured with more virtual CPUs than there
are physical CPUs.
A) Containment
B) CPU scheduling
C) Overcommitment
D) It is not possible to configure a virtual machine with more processors than exist in the system.

Ans: C
Feedback: 16.6.1
Difficulty: Easy
Essay

11. Explain how trap-and-emulate operates.

Ans: A virtual machine may only run in user mode on the host system, however it must provide
the appearance that it can provide both user and kernel mode to the guest operating system.
When the guest operating system invokes a privileged instruction, the virtual machine manager
traps the instruction and executes the instruction on the host operating system on behalf of the
guest operating system.
Feedback: 16.4.1
Difficulty: Medium

12. In what ways does the JVM protect and manage memory?

Ans: After a class is loaded, the verifier checks that the .class file is valid Java bytecode and
does not overflow or underflow the stack. It also ensures that the bytecode does not perform
pointer arithmetic, which could provide illegal memory access. The JVM also automatically
manages memory by performing garbage collection — the practice of reclaiming memory from
objects no longer in use and returning it to the system.
Feedback: 16.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

13. What are two faster alternatives to implementing the JVM in software on top of a host
operating system?

Ans: A faster software technique is to use a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The first time a Java
method is invoked, the bytecodes for the method are turned into native machine language for the
host system, and then cached for subsequent invocations. A potentially faster technique is to run
the JVM in hardware on a special Java chip that executes the Java bytecode operations as native
code.
Feedback: 16.7.2
Difficulty: Medium

14. Distinguish between virtualization and emulation

Ans: Virtualization is the process whereby the system hardware is virtualized, thus providing the
appearance to guest operating systems and applications that they are running on native hardware.
In many virtualized environments, virtualization software runs at near native speeds. Simulation
is the approach whereby the actual system is running on one set of hardware, but the guess
system is compiled for a different set of hardware. Simulation software must emulate the
hardware that the guest system is expecting. Because each instruction for the guest system must
be simulated in software rather than hardware, simulation is typically much slower than
virtualization.
Feedback: 16.5.7
Difficulty: Hard

15. Explain why type 2 hypervisors tend to have poorer performance than type 0 and type 1
hypervisors.

Ans: Type 0 and type 1 hypervisors have less overhead than type 2 hypervisors. Type 0
hypervisors run in firmware, providing virtualization that is very close to actual hardware
execution. Type 1 hypervisors are special purpose operating systems that run natively on the
system hardware. Thus, both type 0 and type 1 hypervisors run at near-native speeds. Type 2
hypervisors run as ordinary processes on the host operating system to provide virtualization.
Because of this overhead, type 2 hypervisors tend to have poorer overall performance than type 0
or 1.
Feedback: 16.5
Difficulty: Difficult

True/False

16. Virtual machines are a recent technological idea.

Ans: False
Feedback: 16.2
Difficulty: Easy

17. All major general-purpose CPUs now provide extended amounts of hardware support for
virtualization.

Ans: True
Feedback: 16.4.3
Difficulty: Medium
18. The use of nested page tables can cause TLB misses to increase.

Ans: True
Feedback: 16.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

19. The virtual-machine concept does not offer complete protection of the various system
resources.

Ans: False
Feedback: 2.8
Difficulty: Medium

20. Live migration is not found in general purpose operating systems, but is present in type 0 and
type 1 hypervisors.

Ans: True
Feedback: 16.6.5
Difficulty: Medium

21. A program written for the Java virtual machine need not worry about the specifics of the
hardware or the operating system on which it will run.

Ans: True
Feedback: 16.5.6
Difficulty: Easy

22. Some level of hardware support is required to provide virtualization.

Ans: True
Feedback: 16.4.3
Difficulty: Medium
Chapter: Chapter 1

Multiple Choice

1. In a distributed system, a ____ usually indicates the location of a machine.

A) node
B) host
C) site
D) resource

Ans: C
Section: 17.1
Difficulty: Medium

2. ____ involves the movement of jobs from one site to another to distribute processing more
evenly across the network.
A) Computer migration
B) Load sharing
C) Resource sharing
D) Downsizing

Ans: B
Section: 17.1.2
Difficulty: Medium

3. The sftp ___ command transfers a file from the remote machine to the local machine.
A) copy
B) put
C) get
D) cd

Ans: C
Section: 17.2.1
Difficulty: Easy

4. Which of the following routing schemes cannot adapt to link failures or load changes?
A) virtual routing
B) fixed routing
C) dynamic loading
D) All of the above

Ans: B
Section: 17.4.2
Difficulty: Easy

5. Which of the following connection strategies involves breaking up a message into a number
of packets that must be reassembled upon arrival?
A) message switching
B) packet switching
C) circuit switching
D) process switching

Ans: B
Section: 17.4.4
Difficulty: Medium

6. Which of the following layers of a communications network in the OSI protocol is used to
handle frames, or fixed-length parts of packets?
A) network layer
B) physical layer
C) data-link layer
D) transport layer

Ans: C
Section: 17.5
Difficulty: Medium

7. Which of the following is not considered a benefit of process migration?

A) Load balancing
B) Software neutrality
C) Hardware preference
D) Computation speedup

Ans: B
Feedback: 17.2
Difficulty: Easy

8. Which of the following is not a layer in the TCP/IP reference model?

A) Session layer
B) Transport layer
C) Network layer
D) Application layer

Ans: A
Feedback: 17.5
Difficulty: Easy

9. Every Ethernet device has a unique _________ address.

A) IP
B) MAC
C) broadcast
D) ARP

Ans: B
Feedback: 17.6
Difficulty: Medium

10. A ________ is used for detection of packet damage.

A) checksum
B) preamble
C) heartbeat
D) network protocol

Ans: A
Feedback: 17.6
Difficulty: Medium
Essay

11. What are the four major reasons for building distributed systems?

Ans: The four major reasons include resource sharing, computational speedup, reliability, and
communication. Multiple computer systems will have more resources than a single system,
resulting in an increase in resource utilization. Multiple systems have multiple processors
capable of executing portions of a process, resulting in a decrease in the amount of time
required to complete a process. Furthermore, if one system fails, the other systems can continue
to handle a process. Thus, reliability is enhanced. Finally, since the systems are connected via a
communication network, advanced messaging and communication routines that were used in
standalone systems can be expanded into a network setting.
Section: 17.1
Difficulty: Medium

12. Briefly describe the function of the ssh facility and how it works.

Ans: The ssh facility allows users to log in remotely. A telnet command results in the
formation of an encrypted socket connection between the local machine and remote machine.
ssh creates a transparent, bidirectional link that sends input and receives output after a correct
login name and password have been received by the remote machine.
Section: 17.2.1
Difficulty: Medium

13. What are two different approaches to data migration?


Ans: Data migration can be implemented such that when a computer requests a file that exists
at a different site, the entire file is copied and all subsequent operations on the file are performed
locally. When the file is no longer needed, the entire file is transferred back to the remote site
from which it originated. The other method involves copying only the portion of the file that is
needed to immediately perform the requested operation. In this case, multiple transfers may be
required. When the data is no longer needed, it must be transferred back to the remote site.
Section: 17.2
Difficulty: Medium
14. What is computation migration?

Ans: Computation migration involves the transfer of computation, rather than data, across the
systems. Generally, if the time to transfer the data is longer than the time to execute the remote
command should be used.
Section: 17.2
Difficulty: Medium

15. What are some reasons for implementing process migration?


Ans: Process migration can be used to help distribute load balancing among systems in the
network, speed up computation by dividing up a process into pieces, allow a process to execute
on preferred hardware, or allow a process to use software not located on the originating system.
Section: 17.2
Difficulty: Medium

16. Explain the difference between fixed and dynamic routing.


Ans: In the case of static routing, the routing table is changed only by manual update (a new
file is loaded onto the router). With dynamic routing, a routing protocol is used between routers
to inform them of network changes and to allow them to update their routing tables
automatically.
Section: 17.4.2
Difficulty: Medium

17. Describe the tradeoffs among the three most common connection strategies.

Ans: Circuit switching requires substantial set-up time and may waste network bandwidth, but
it incurs less overhead for shipping each message. Conversely, message and packet switching
require less set-up time but incur more overhead per message. Packet switching is the method
most commonly used on data networks because it makes the best use of network bandwidth.
Section: 17.4.4
Difficulty: Medium

18. According to OSI network model, what is a physical communication layer?


Ans: The physical layer is responsible for handling both the mechanical and the electrical
details of the physical transmission of a bit stream. The communicating systems must agree on
the electrical presentation of a binary 0 or 1. This layer is implemented in the hardware of the
networking device.
Section: 17.5
Difficulty: Medium

19. Distinguish between the OSI and TCP/IP network models.


Ans: The primary difference between the OSI and TCP/IP models is the size and content of the
network stacks. The OSI model identifies seven layers whereas TCP/IP identifies only three,
combining some of the functionality of the presentation and session layers in the application and
transport layers. Similarly, TCP/IP does not identify either a data link or physical layer, relying
on the specific physical networks (i.e. Ethernet or 802.11 wireless) to provide that level of
functionality.
Section: 17.5
Difficulty: Medium

True/False

20. The communication links in WANs tend to have a higher speed and lower error rate than do
their LAN counterparts.

Ans: False
Section: 17.3.2
Difficulty: Medium

21. An Ethernet network has no central controller.

Ans: True
Section: 17.6
Difficulty: Medium
22. TCP is an unreliable, connectionless protocol.

Ans: False
Section: 17.6
Difficulty: Medium

23. Every Ethernet device has a unique byte number, called an ARP address, assigned to it.

Ans: False
Section: 17.6
Difficulty: Medium

24. TCP/IP is an implementation of the OSI network model.

Ans: False
Section: 17.5
Difficulty: Medium