Tutorial Week 2
Questions
Q1: What are the two main responsibilities or identifying
features of an Operating System?
Q2: What is multiprogramming?
Q3: Why was timesharing not widespread on second generation
computers (also so-called batched systems)?
Q4: Which of the following instructions (or instruction sequences) should only be allowed in kernel mode?
- Disable all interrupts.
- Read the time of day clock.
- Set the time of day clock.
- Change the memory map.
- Write to the hard disk controller register.
- Write all buffered blocks associated with a file back to disk (fsync).
Q5: On UNIX, which of the following are considered system calls? Why?
- read()
- printf()
- malloc()
- open()
Q6: What are the characteristics of a good operating system?
Q7: Why must kernel programmers be especially careful when implementing system calls?
Q8: Why is recursion or large arrays of local variables
avoided by kernel programmers?