B.S.W.E. Bachelor of Software Engineering Operating Systems & Systems Programming 3

Question 1

What is Inter-Process Communication (IPC)?

Accepted Answer

Mechanisms that allow processes to exchange data and synchronize actions

Answer

IPC refers to OS mechanisms—such as pipes, message queues, shared memory, and sockets—that allow separate processes to communicate and coordinate.

Question 2

In file systems, what is an inode?

Accepted Answer

A data structure storing metadata about a file (permissions, size, timestamps) but not the file name

Answer

An inode is a data structure in Unix-like file systems that contains metadata about a file, such as ownership, permissions, size, and pointers to data blocks, but not the filename itself.

Question 3

What is a context switch in operating systems?

Accepted Answer

The process of saving the state of a running process and loading the state of another process

Answer

A context switch is when the OS saves the current process state (registers, program counter) and restores a previously saved state to run a different process.

Question 4

What does the fork() system call do in Unix/Linux?

Accepted Answer

Creates a child process that is an exact copy of the parent process

Answer

fork() creates a new child process that is a duplicate of the calling parent process, with its own copy of the parent's address space.

Question 5

What is thrashing in virtual memory management?

Accepted Answer

A condition where the system spends more time swapping pages than executing processes

Answer

Thrashing occurs when the CPU spends most of its time servicing page faults rather than executing instructions, severely degrading system performance.

B.S.W.E. Bachelor of Software Engineering Practice Test

B.S.W.E. Bachelor of Software Engineering Practice Test

B.S.W.E. Bachelor of Software Engineering Operating Systems & Systems Programming 3