Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Operating System Insight

Hi Friends...


Today I will share with you some questions on operating system.
Q. What is mounting?

Mounting is the mechanism by which two different file systems can be combined together. This is one of the services provided by the operating system, which allows the user to work with two different file systems, and some of the secondary devices.

Q. What do you mean by FAT (File Allocation Table)?

A table that indicates the physical location on secondary storage of the space allocated to a file. FAT chains the clusters (group of sectors) to define the contents of the file. FAT allocates clusters to files.

Q. What is a Kernel?

Kernel is the nucleus or core of the operating system. This represents small part of the code, which is thought to be the entire operating system, it is most intensively used. Generally, the kernel is maintained permanently in main memory, and other portions of the OS are moved to and from the secondary storage (mostly hard disk).

Q. What is Multi-Processing?

The ability of an operating system to use more than one CPU in a single computer system. Symmetrical multiprocessing refers to the OS's ability to assign tasks dynamically to the next available processor, whereas asymmetrical multiprocessing requires that the original program designer choose the processor to use for a given task at the time of writing the program.

Q. What is SMP?

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.

Q. What is multi Tasking?

Multitasking is a logical extension of multi-programming. This refers to the simultaneous execution of more than one program, by switching between them, in a single computer system.

Q. Define multi Threading?

The concurrent processing of several tasks or threads inside the same program or process. Because several tasks can be processed parallely and no tasks have to wait for the another to finish its execution.

Q. What are the advantages of threads?

Threads provide parallel processing like processes but they have one important advantage over process, they are much more efficient.
Threads are cheaper to create and destroy because they do not require allocation and de-allocation of a new address space or other process resources.
It is faster to switch between threads. It will be faster since the memory-mapping does not have to be setup and the memory and address translation caches do not have to be violated.
Threads are efficient as they share memory. They do not have to use system calls (which are slower because of context switches) to communicate.


Will be sharing with you some more Q&A soon...


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Padhaku Einstein

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Padhaku

First of all you are really cute... :)

Could you plz tell something about reentrancy and compaction

Thanks

Deb