Operating Systems 2023

U3680
National Taipei University

Midterm Exam [Chapter 1 - Chapter 5]

1. What are the goals of multi-programming and time-sharing? (6%)

• Multi-programming: increase CPU utilization and keep CPU busy (3%)

• Time-sharing: provide interactivity and reduce response time (3%)

2. Please answer the following questions about interrupts:

(a) What is the purpose of interrupts? (4%)

Interrupts provide an event-driven way to change the flow of control in the CPU.
(4%)
(b) List three types of software interrupts. (6%)
Invalid memory access, software error, system calls. (6%, 2% for each one)

3. Please answer the following questions about system protection:

(a) How does an OS protect the CPU resource (for example, avoid an infinite loop of user
programs)? (3%)
Implement timers and use time-sharing. When the timer reaches the value 0,
an interrupt occurs for the context switch. (3%, answering one of timer or
time-sharing can get all scores)
(b) How does an OS protect the memory space of a process? (3%)
Use the base register and the limit register to restrict the memory address that
a process can access. (3%)

4. Describe why Application Programming Interface (API) can improve portability. (4%)
Different OSes share the same programming interface despite the underlying imple-
mentation or hardware being different. For this reason, when a program needs to be
run on a different OS, it just needs re-compiling, not re-writing. (4%)

5. Why a micro-kernel approach is usually safe (3%) but has poor performance (3%)
The micro-kernel approach keeps the Kernel as small as possible (fewer bugs). It is
also safer because most parts of the original kernels are moved to user space. Thereby,
a crash of these system programs will not lead to a crash of the entire system (3%).
However, the communication between components requires message passing, which
is slow. (3%)

6. Message passing and shared memory are two inter-process communication models. Please
list their advantages and disadvantages as many as possible. (6%)

• Message passing
Operating Systems 2023 Midterm Exam 2

– Strength: naturally synchronized (1%), can communicate across machines

(1%)
– Weakness: slower (1%)
• Shared memory
– Strength: faster (1%)
– Weakness: need to handle synchronization (1%), cannot communicate across
machines (1%)

7. Which of the following components of the program state are shared across threads in a
multi-threaded process? (4%) Describe why the rest parts could NOT be shared. (4%)

(a) Register values

(b) Heap memory
(c) Global variables
(d) Stack memory
• b and c are shared (4%)
• a and d could not be shared because different threads could run the different
parts (functions) of a program (4%)

8. Please answer the two advantages of thread pools. (6%)

• It is usually slightly faster to service a request with an existing thread than

create a new thread. (3%)
• It allows the number of threads in the applications to be bound to the size of
the pool. (3%)

9. Draw the diagram of the process state and briefly describe the meaning of each state. (10%)

• Diagram of process state (5%)

• – New: the process is being created (1%)

– Ready: the process is in the memory waiting to be assigned to a processor
(1%)
– Running: the process whose instructions are being executed by CPU (1%)
– Waiting: the process is waiting for events (e.g., I/O) to occur (1%)
– Terminated: the process has finished execution (1%)

10. What are the problems when the time quantum of the Round Robin scheduling becomes too
short and too long? (6%)

Operating Systems 2023 Midterm Exam

Operating Systems 2023 Midterm Exam 3

• Too short: the context switch occurs too frequently, resulting in high overhead
(3%)
• Too long: RR will become an FCFS scheduling algorithm, if a long process comes
first, other processes would wait too long (3%)

11. What is the difference between preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling? (8%)

• Non-preemptive: the OS can not interrupt a process if it is under its CPU burst.
CPU scheduling can only be performed when a running process is terminated or
switched to the waiting state. (4%)
• Preemptive: the OS can interrupt a process even if it is under its CPU burst.
Besides a running process being terminated or switched to the waiting state,
scheduling can also be performed when a context switch happens or a process is
switching from the waiting state to the ready state. (4%)

12. Describe why the original shortest-job-first scheduling is difficult to apply in real-world cases.
(3%) How do we approximate it? (3%)
We will never know the duration of the CPU bursts of processes until they are
executed. (3%) We can only use the prediction of CPU bursts estimated from
previous CPU bursts. (3%)

13. The following processes are being scheduled using a preemptive, priority-based, round-robin
scheduling algorithm. Each process is assigned a numerical priority, with a higher number
indicating a higher relative priority. The scheduler will execute the highest priority process. For
processes with the same priority, a round-robin scheduler will be used with a time quantum of 10
units. If a process is preempted by a higher-priority process, the preempted process
is placed at the end of the queue.

Process Priority Burst Arrival

P1 1 10 0
P2 2 15 0
P3 3 15 10
P4 3 20 15
P5 4 10 35

(a) Show the scheduling order of the processes using a Gantt chart. (5%)

(b) What is the waiting time for each process? (5%)

• P1 : 60 (1%)
• P2 : 45 (1%)
• P3 : 10 (1%)
• P4 : 20 (1%)
• P5 : 0 (1%)

14. Using the program shown below, what are the outputs of this program? (8%)

Operating Systems 2023 Midterm Exam

Operating Systems 2023 Midterm Exam 4

{0, 3, 6, 9};

• line X: CHILD: 0 CHILD: -3 CHILD: -12 CHILD: -27 (4%, get 2% if the numbers
are correct)
• line Y: PARENT: 0 PARENT: 3 PARENT: 6 PARENT: 9 (4%, get 2% if the
numbers are correct))

Operating Systems 2023 Midterm Exam