Operating Systems Questions

Q:

What is multi tasking, multi programming, multi threading?

Answer

Multi programming: Multiprogramming is the technique of running several programs at a time using timesharing. It allows a computer to do several things at the same time. Multiprogramming creates logical parallelism. The concept of multiprogramming is that the operating system keeps several jobs in memory simultaneously. The operating system selects a job from the job pool and starts executing a job, when that job needs to wait for any i/o operations the CPU is switched to another job. So the main idea here is that the CPU is never idle. 


Multi tasking: Multitasking is the logical extension of multiprogramming .The concept of multitasking is quite similar to multiprogramming but difference is that the switching between jobs occurs so frequently that the users can interact with each program while it is running. This concept is also known as time-sharing systems. A time-shared operating system uses CPU scheduling and multiprogramming to provide each user with a small portion of time-shared system. 


Multi threading: An application typically is implemented as a separate process with several threads of control. In some situations a single application may be required to perform several similar tasks for example a web server accepts client requests for web pages, images, sound, and so forth. A busy web server may have several of clients concurrently accessing it. If the web server ran as a traditional single-threaded process, it would be able to service only one client at a time. The amount of time that a client might have to wait for its request to be serviced could be enormous. So it is efficient to have one process that contains multiple threads to serve the same purpose. This approach would multithread the web-server process, the server would create a separate thread that would listen for client requests when a request was made rather than creating another process it would create another thread to service the request. To get the advantages like responsiveness, Resource sharing economy and utilization of multiprocessor architectures multithreading concept can be used.

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1 1965
Q:

What is FtDisk?

Answer

It is a fault tolerance disk driver for Windows NT.

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1 1961
Q:

What is Memory-Management Unit (MMU)?

Answer

Hardware device that maps virtual to physical address. In MMU scheme, the value in the relocation register is added to every address generated by a user process at the time it is sent to memory.


->The user program deals with logical addresses; it never sees the real physical addresses

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0 1961
Q:

What is the state of the processor, when a process is waiting for some event to occur?

Answer

Waiting state

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2 1957
Q:

What is time-stamping?

Answer

It is a technique proposed by Lamport, used to order events in a distributed system without the use of clocks. This scheme is intended to order events consisting of the transmission of messages. Each system 'i' in the network maintains a counter Ci. Every time a system transmits a message, it increments its counter by 1 and attaches the time-stamp Ti to the message. When a message is received, the receiving system 'j' sets its counter Cj to 1 more than the maximum of its current value and the incoming time-stamp Ti. At each site, the ordering of messages is determined by the following rules: For messages x from site i and y from site j, x precedes y if one of the following conditions holds....(a) if Ti

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1 1908
Q:

What is DRAM? In which form does it store data?

Answer

DRAM is not the best, but it’s cheap, does the job, and is available almost everywhere you look. DRAM data resides in a cell made of a capacitor and a transistor. The capacitor tends to lose data unless it’s recharged every couple of milliseconds, and this recharging tends to slow down the performance of DRAM compared to speedier RAM types.

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1 1890
Q:

What is fragmentation?

Answer

Fragmentation occurs in a dynamic memory allocation system when many of the free blocks are too small to satisfy any request.

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1 1884
Q:

While running DOS on a PC, which command would be used to duplicate the entire diskette?

Answer

diskcopy

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1 1877