OPERATING SYSTEM INTERVIEW QUESTION

OPERATING SYSTEM INTERVIEW QUESTION  for IGNOU BCA MCA Students

1) Explain the main purpose of an operating system?

Operating systems exist for two main purposes. One is that it is designed to make sure a

computer system performs well by managing its computational activities. Another is that it

provides an environment for the development and execution of programs.

2) What is demand paging?

Demand paging is a system wherein area of memory that are not currently being used are

swapped to disk to make room for an application's need.

3) What are the advantages of a multiprocessor system?

With an increased number of processors, there is considerable increase in throughput. It can

also save more money because they can share resources. Finally, overall reliability is increased

as well.

4) What is kernel?

Kernel is the core of every operating system. It connects applications to the actual processing of

data. It also manages all communications between software and hardware components to

ensure usability and reliability.

5) What are real-time systems?

Real-time systems are used when rigid time requirements have been placed on the operation of

a processor. It has well defined and fixed time constraints.

6) What is virtual memory?

Virtual memory is a memory management technique for letting processes execute outside of

memory. This is very useful especially is an executing program cannot fit in the physical

memory.

7) Describe the objective of multiprogramming.

The main objective of multiprogramming is to have process running at all times. With this

design, CPU utilization is said to be maximized.

8 ) What are time sharing systems?

In a Time sharing system, the CPU executes multiple jobs by switching among them, also

known as multitasking. This process happens so fast that users can actually interact with each

program while it is running.

9) What is SMP?

SMP is short for Symmetric MultiProcessing, and is the most common type of multipleprocessor

systems. In this system, each processor runs an identical copy of the operating

system, and these copies communicate with one another as needed.

10) How are server systems classified?

Server systems can be classified as either computer-server systems or file server systems. In

the first case, an interface is made available for clients to send requests to perform an action. In

the second case, provisions are available for clients to create, access and update files.

11) What is asymmetric clustering?

In asymmetric clustering, a machine is in a state known as hot standby mode where it does

nothing but to monitor the active server. That machine takes the active server's role should the

server fails.

12) What is a thread?

A thread is a basic unit of CPU utilization. In general, a thread is composed of a thread ID,

program counter, register set and the stack.

13) Give some benefits of multithreaded programming.

- there is an increased responsiveness to the user

- resource sharing within the process

- economy

- utilization of multiprocessing architecture

14) Briefly explain FCFS.

FCFS is short for First-come, first-served, and is one type of scheduling algorithm. In this

scheme, the process that requests the CPU first is allocated the CPU first. Implementation is

managed by a FIFO queue.