Mostly Asked Basic O.S Questions

Following are a few basic OS questions that cover the Essentials of OS:

Q What is thrashing?

It is a phenomenon in virtual memory schemes when the processor spends most of its time swapping pages, rather than executing instructions. This is due to an inordinate number of page faults.

Q Explain Belady's Anomaly.?

Also called FIFO anomaly of O.S. Usually, on increasing the number of frames allocated to a process' virtual memory, the process execution is faster, because fewer page faults occur. Sometimes, the reverse happens, i.e., the execution time increases even when more frames are allocated to the process. This is Belady's Anomaly. This is true for certain page reference patterns.

Q What is a binary semaphore? What is its use?

A binary semaphore is one, which takes only 0 & 1 as values. They are used to implement mutual exclusion & synchronize concurrent processes.

Q List the Coffman's conditions that lead to a deadlock in OS ?

Mutual Exclusion: Only one process may use a critical resource at a time.

Hold & Wait: A process may be allocated some resources while waiting for others.

No Pre-emption: No resource can be forcible removed from a process holding it. Circular Wait: A closed chain of processes exist such that each process holds at least

Q Explain the concept of Reentrancy in Operating systems.?

It is a useful, memory-saving technique for multiprogrammed timesharing systems. A Reentrant Procedure in O.S is one in which multiple users can share a single copy of a program during the same period. Reentrancy has 2 key aspects: The program code cannot modify itself, & the local data for each user process must be stored separately.

Thus, the permanent part is the code, & the temporary part is the pointer back to the calling program & local variables used by that program. Each execution instance is called activation. It executes the code in the permanent part, but has its own copy of local variables/parameters. The temporary part associated with each activation is the activation record. Generally, the activation record is kept on the stack.

Note: A reentrant procedure can be interrupted & called by an interrupting program, & still execute correctly on returning to the procedure.