CPA Operating Systems & Process Management Flashcards
6 cards from real CPA practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 6 CPA Operating Systems & Process Management flashcards as text
What is virtual memory in modern operating systems?
Answer: A technique that uses disk space to extend apparent RAM
Virtual memory uses secondary storage to give processes the illusion of more RAM than physically exists by swapping pages in and out.
In memory management, what is a 'page fault'?
Answer: An interrupt triggered when a process accesses a page not currently in physical memory
A page fault is an interrupt raised by the MMU when the requested memory page is not present in RAM and must be loaded from disk.
Which inter-process communication (IPC) method provides a one-way data stream between a producer and consumer process?
Answer: Pipe
A pipe provides a unidirectional byte stream that lets one process write data which another process reads.
What is the difference between a process and a thread?
Answer: A process has its own memory space; threads within a process share the same memory space
A process has an independent address space, while threads within the same process share the same address space but have separate stacks and registers.
What does the fork() system call do in Unix/Linux?
Answer: Creates a child process that is a copy of the calling process
fork() duplicates the calling process, creating a child with the same code, data, and file descriptors but a different PID.
Which page replacement algorithm replaces the page that has not been used for the longest period of time?
Answer: Least Recently Used (LRU)
LRU evicts the page whose most recent use is furthest in the past, approximating optimal replacement based on past access history.