Question and Answer

1. What are the major activities of an Operating System with regards to Process Management?

The operating system is responsible for the following activities in connection with process management.
Process creation and deletion.

Process suspension (process is in I/O wait queue, or “swapped” out to disk, …) and resumption (move to ready queue or execution) – manage the state of the process.
Provision of mechanisms for:
Process synchronization - concurrent processing is supported thus the need for synchronization of processes or threads.

Process communication

Deadlock handling


2. What are the major activities of an Operating System with regards to Memory Management?

Keep track of which parts of memory are currently being used and by whom.
Decide which processes to load when memory space becomes available - long term or medium term scheduler.
Mapping addresses in a process to absolute memory addresses - at load time or run time.
Allocate and deallocate memory space as needed.
Memory partitioning, allocation, paging (VM), address translation, defrag, …
Memory protection


3. What are the major activities of an Operating System with regards to Secondary-Storage Management?

- Free space management
- Storage allocation
- Disk scheduling – minimize seeks (arm movement … very slow operation)
- Disk as the media for mapping virtual memory space
- Disk caching for performance
- Disk utilities: defrag, recovery of lost clusters, etc.


4. What are the major activities of an Operating System with regards to File Management?

- File creation and deletion - system calls or commands.
- Directory creation and deletion - system calls or commands.
- Support of primitives for manipulating files and directories in an efficient manner - system calls or commands.
- Mapping files onto secondary storage.
- File backup on stable (nonvolatile) storage media.
EX: File Allocation Table (FAT) for Windows/PC systems


5. What is the purpose of the command-interpreter?

- The program that reads and interprets control statements is called variously:
·command-line interpreter (Control card interpreter in the “old batch days”)
·shell (in UNIX)
- Command.com for external commands in DOS
- Its function is to get and execute the next command statement.