SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND

ENGIENEERING

Assignment.1 RKOPERATING SYSTEM Reg no

Date: URK20CS2099
11/12/21

20cs2036 – OPERATING SYSTEM

Assignment.1

Question 1. What is OS ?

Answer :An operating system (OS) is system software that

manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides
common services for computer programs.

Question 2. What is Interrupt ?

Answer : Interrupt is a signal emitted by hardware or software when a

process or an event needs immediate attention. It alerts the processor to a
high-priority process requiring interruption of the current working process.
In I/O devices one of the bus control lines is dedicated for this purpose
and is called the Interrupt Service Routine (ISR).
It is referred to as an input signal that has the highest priority for hardware
or software events that requires immediate processing of an event. During
the early days of computing, the processor had to wait for the signal to
process any events. The processor should check every hardware and
software program to understand if there is any signal to be processed. This
 method would consume a number of clock cycles and makes the processor
busy. Just in case, if any signal was generated, the processor would again
take some time to process the event, leading to poor system performance.

Question 2. Short Note on types of Interrupt ?

Answer : There are three types of interrupts.

1. Hardware Interrupts
An electronic signal sent from an external device or hardware to
communicate with the processor indicating that it requires immediate
attention. For example, strokes from a keyboard or an action from a mouse
invoke hardware interrupts causing the CPU to read and process it. So it
arrives asynchronously and during any point of time while executing an
instruction.

Hardware interrupts are classified into two types

 Maskable Interrupts – Processors have to interrupt mask register

that allows enabling and disabling of hardware interrupts. Every signal
has a bit placed in the mask register. If this bit is set, an interrupt is
enabled & disabled when a bit is not set, or vice versa. Signals that
interrupt the processors through these masks are referred to as masked
interrupts.
 Non-maskable Interrupts (NMI) – The NMIs are the highest
priority activities that need to be processed immediately and under any
situation, such as a timeout signal generated from a watchdog timer.

2. Software Interrupts
The processor itself requests a software interrupt after executing certain
instructions or if particular conditions are met. These can be a specific
instruction that triggers an interrupt such as subroutine calls and can be
triggered unexpectedly because of program execution errors, known as
exceptions or traps.

3. Terrupts

The Interrupt signal sent by the CPU itself are known as Terrupts.
Question 4. What is karnel?
Answer: The kernel is a computer program at the core of a
computer's operating system and has complete control over everything in
the system.[1] It is the portion of the operating system code that is always
resident in memory,[2] and facilitates interactions between hardware and
software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources (e.g.
I/O, memory, Cryptography) via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between
processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the utilization of
common resources e.g. CPU & cache usage, file systems, and network
sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded
on startup (after the bootloader). It handles the rest of startup as well as
memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software,
translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing
unit.

Question 5. Why OS is called Resource Allocator?

Answer: Operating system is a system software which acts as an interface

between hardware and application programs. ... Since operating system
decides over which program will be using RAM / disk or any other device
at a particular time. That's why operating system is called as resource
allocator.