ICT Operating System Fundamentals 3

Question 1

What is 'thrashing' in an operating system?

Accepted Answer

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

Answer

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

Question 2

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

Accepted Answer

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

Answer

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

Question 3

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

Accepted Answer

Device driver

Answer

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

Question 4

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

Accepted Answer

Gradually increasing the priority of waiting processes to prevent starvation

Answer

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

Question 5

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

Accepted Answer

Parent and child share memory pages until one modifies them

Answer

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

ICT - Information Communication Technology Practice Test