Operating Systems Questions

To achieve maximum efficiency and reliability a mode of operation known as symmetric multiprocessing is used. In essence, with SMP any process or threads can be assigned to any processor.

Virtual memory is hardware technique where the system appears to have more memory that it actually does. This is done by time-sharing, the physical memory and storage parts of the memory one disk when they are not actively being used.

The special thread a dispatcher will execute when no ready thread is found.

Data registers - can be assigned to a variety of functions by the programmer. They can be used with any machine instruction that performs operations on data.
Address registers - contain main memory addresses of data and instructions or they contain a portion of the address that is used in the calculation of the complete addresses.

An interpreter reads one instruction at a time and carries out the actions implied by that instruction. It does not perform any translation. But a compiler translates the entire instructions.