Mid Term Examination May 2010

CSC 206 1.5 Operating Systems

Note:
Answer all questions. Time: 1.5 hours. You may use calculators.

1. What is a clustered system? Briefly give the difference between symmetric and asymmetric
clustering.
Using a diagram, briefly explain how an Operating System does Book keeping to track
Input/Output progress.
Draw a flowchart to show how address translation is used to enforce protection for a process to
access its logical memory.

2. Draw the layered architectures of Windows and Linux operating systems.

Explain briefly the advantages of using virtual machines instead of dedicated computers.
Draw the virtual machine architecture of a computer system and briefly explain the function of
each component.

3. What are the states a process can be in at any given time. Explain using a state transition
diagram.
Describe briefly the methods of local procedure call and remote procedure call in inter-process
communication.
A server is setup to provide email services to several clients. Assuming the client IP address is
10.32.193.2 and the servers IP address is 192.248.87.3, explain briefly how inter-process
communication takes place for the client to access email in the server.

4. What are the major criteria for performance evaluation of CPU scheduling?

Given below are five processes with their arrival and service times.

Processes arrival times service times

P1 0 8
P2 2 6
P3 5 2
P4 7 9
P5 9 4

Calculate the average wait time of a process if Pre-emptive Shortest Job First scheduling
algorithm is used?
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