Final Review Short Answer Questions

  1. What are the three views of an operating system? Describe them.

    Application View which describes what services does an OS provide. System View which describes what problem does it solve.

  2. Define the kernel of the OS. What things are considered part of the OS but not the kernel?

    The kernel is part of the OS that responds to system calls, interrupts, and exceptions, and runs from boot-up to shut-down in privileged mode.

  3. What are some advantages of allowing more than one thread to exists simultaneously?

    We can allow parallelism on multicore systems, and improve responsiveness, and allow overlap of I/O and computation.

  4. What is contained in a thread context? What is the thread control block?

    A thread context has its own registers and stack. The thread control blocks stores the context and kernel metadata for that thread.

  5. Describe what happens during a context switch? What is dispatching?

  6. What is the diļ¬€erence between thread yield() and thread sleep()?
  7. How is an involuntary context switch accomplished? Define quantum.
  8. Describe what happens when an interrupt occurs. Where do interrupts come from?