Operating System Fundamentals Flashcards

What is 'thrashing' in an operating system?

Answer: A state where the OS spends more time paging than executing processes

Thrashing occurs when a system has too many processes competing for too few memory frames, causing constant page faults.

What is the main difference between a hard link and a soft (symbolic) link?

Answer: Hard links point to the inode; soft links point to the filename path

A hard link directly references the file's inode, while a symbolic link stores the path to another file name.

Which OS component is responsible for translating high-level I/O calls into device-specific operations?

Answer: Device driver

Device drivers provide an abstraction layer that translates generic OS I/O requests into hardware-specific commands.

In the context of CPU scheduling, what is 'aging'?

Answer: Gradually increasing the priority of waiting processes to prevent starvation

Aging gradually increases the priority of processes that have been waiting a long time, preventing starvation.

What does 'copy-on-write' (COW) enable in process forking?

Answer: Parent and child share memory pages until one modifies them

Copy-on-write defers page copying until either the parent or child process actually modifies a shared page.

Which RAID level provides both striping and mirroring?

Answer: RAID 10

RAID 10 combines striping (RAID 0) for performance and mirroring (RAID 1) for redundancy.

What is the role of the 'inode' in a Unix-like file system?

Answer: It contains metadata about a file such as permissions, size, and disk block locations

An inode stores file metadata (permissions, timestamps, size, block pointers) but not the file name or content.