Operating Systems Questions

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.

The processes that are residing in the main memory and are ready and waiting to execute are kept on a list called the ready queue.

Java is one of the small number of languages that support at the language level for the creation and management of threads. However, because threads are managed by the java virtual machine (JVM), not by a user-level library or kernel, it is difficult to classify Java threads as either user- or kernel-level.

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.

A situation, where several processes access and manipulate the same data concurrently and the outcome of the execution depends on the particular order in which the access takes place, is called race condition. To guard against the race condition we need to ensure that only one process at a time can be manipulating the same data. The technique we use for this is called process synchronization.

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.

Mutual exclusion

Hold and wait

No preemption

Circular wait

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.