Operating Systems Questions

System calls provide the interface between a process and the operating system. System calls for modern Microsoft windows platforms are part of the win32 API, which is available for all the compilers written for Microsoft windows.

Mutual exclusion

Hold and wait

No preemption

Circular wait

A list of processes waiting for a particular I/O device is called device queue.

User thread

Kernel thread

SCSI - Small computer systems interface is a type of interface used for computer components such as hard drives, optical drives, scanners and tape drives. It is a competing technology to standard IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics).

We encounter cycle stealing in the context of Direct Memory Access (DMA). Either the DMA controller can use the data bus when the CPU does not need it, or it may force the CPU to temporarily suspend operation. The latter technique is called cycle stealing. Note that cycle stealing can be done only at specific break points in an instruction cycle.

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.

Hard real-time systems required to complete a critical task within a guaranteed amount of time.
Soft real-time computing requires that critical processes receive priority over less fortunate ones.