CS3013/502 First Exam Topic Outline

Here is an outline of the topics that were covered for the first exam:

• Introduction
  • History
  • Structure
  • Concepts
    • Processes
    • Shells
    • Files
    • System Calls
• Processes
  • Implementation
    • Process control block
    • Context-switching
    • States (ready, running, blocked) and transitions
    • Creation
      • fork()
      • exec()
  • Scheduling
    • FCFS, SJF, RR, Prio, Multi-level feedback queue ...
    • Windows specifics (a bit)
    • Linux specifics (a bit)
  • Synchronization
    • Critical sections
    • Semaphores
    • Monitors
    • Message passing
    • Software signals
    • Classic synch problems
      • Dining philosophers
      • Readers/Writers
• Parallel Systems and Threads
  • Concepts
  • Implementation
• Simple Operating System
  • system.h header file
  • Dispatcher() for scheduling
  • TimerInterruptHandler() for time-slices
  • use-proc-table.c() for 2 processor support
  • semaphore.c changes to implement semaphores
• Memory Management
  • Simple
  • Linking and Loading
  • Variable and Fixed Partitions
  • Paging
    • Page Tables
    • Associative Registers
    • Multilevel Paging
    • Inverted Page Tables
  • Segmentation
• Virtual Memory
  • Swapping and Demand Paging
  • Page faults
  • Page replacement algorithms
  • Thrashing
  • Paging tradeoffs
  • Issues
• Project 1 - Mini Shell
  • System Calls
    • exec()
    • fork()
    • wait()
    • getrusage()
    • gettimeofday()
  • Implementation issues
    • Error checking
    • Parsing
• Project 2 - Mini Chat
  • (Basic ideas, since not yet completed)
  • System Calls
    • semcreate(), semattach()
    • shmcreate(), shmattach()
  • Implementation issues
    • synchronization of processes

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Send all questions to the claypool at cs.wpi.edu.