Bachelor of Computer Engineering Operating System Flashcards
7 cards from real B CompE Bachelor of Computer Engineering practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Bachelor of Computer Engineering Operating System flashcards as text
Which page replacement algorithm suffers from Belady's anomaly, where adding more frames can increase page faults?
Answer: FIFO
FIFO is the classic algorithm known to exhibit Belady's anomaly, where increasing physical frames can paradoxically raise the page fault count.
In a Unix-like OS, which system call creates a new process that is an exact copy of the calling process?
Answer: fork()
fork() duplicates the calling process, giving the child an identical copy of the parent's address space, file descriptors, and registers.
What is the term for the condition where a process holds one resource and waits for another held by a second process, which in turn waits for the first?
Answer: Deadlock
Deadlock occurs when two or more processes are each waiting for a resource held by another, forming a circular wait with no progress possible.
Which scheduling metric measures the ratio of burst time to turnaround time, used in the HRRN algorithm?
Answer: Response ratio
HRRN selects the process with the highest response ratio = (waiting time + burst time) / burst time to prevent starvation.
In virtual memory systems, what structure maps virtual page numbers to physical frame numbers?
Answer: Page table
The page table maintained per-process translates virtual page numbers into the corresponding physical frame numbers for address translation.
Which inter-process communication mechanism allows a fixed-size buffer shared between producer and consumer processes, typically implemented in the kernel?
Answer: Message queue
Message queues store messages in a kernel-managed queue with defined capacity, decoupling producers and consumers without requiring shared memory mapping.
What technique does an OS use to allow a program larger than physical RAM to run by keeping only active portions in memory?
Answer: Demand paging
Demand paging loads pages into RAM only when they are accessed, generating a page fault on first reference and retrieving them from disk.
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