OS Organization: Final Exam Sample Questions - Multiple Choice

The two basic steps used by the processor in instruction processing are:
A. Fetch and Instruction cycles
B. Instruction and Execute cycles
C. Fetch and Execute cycles
D. None of the above

When an external device becomes ready to be serviced by the processor, the device sends this type of signal to the processor:
A. Interrupt signal
B. Halt signal
C. Handler signal
D. None of the above

A process switch may occur when the system encounters an interrupt condition, such as that generated by a:
A. Memory fault
B. Supervisor call
C. Trap
D. All of the above

In a uniprocessor system, mutual exclusion can be guaranteed by:
A. Overlapping processes
B. Interleaving processes
C. Disabling interrupts
D. All of the above

The situation where the processor spends most of its time swapping process pieces rather than executing instructions is called:

A. Paging
B. The Principle of Locality
C. Thrashing
D. None of the above

What is the purpose of dual-mode operation?
A. To enable the operating system to take control of the processor.
B. To protect the operating system and hardware from corruption.
C. To save power.
D. To distinguish an ordinary user from a super-user (administrator).

Which technique was introduced because a single job could not keep both the CPU and the I/O devices busy?
A. Multiprogramming.
B. Spooling.
C. Preemptive scheduling.
D. Time-sharing.

Which one of the following operations cannot be used to acquire a lock on a resource?
A. Busy-waiting using test-and-set instruction.
B. Waiting on a semaphore
C. Busy-waiting using exchange instruction.
D. Enabling interrupts.

How can a semaphore s be used to solve the critical-section problem?
A. Initialize s to 0; enter section after waiting on s; exit after signaling on s.
B. Initialize s to 1; enter section after waiting on s; exit after signaling on s.
C. Initialize s to 0; enter section after signaling on s; exit after waiting on s.
D. Initialize s to 1; enter section after signaling on s; exit after waiting on s.

A(n) ________ process tends to use all the processor time that the system allocates for it.
A. processor-bound
B. batch
C. interactive
D. I/O-bound

In a virtual memory system, ________.
A. determining how to map virtual addresses to physical addresses is of great importance
B. MMUs convert physical addresses to virtual addresses during execution
C. each virtual address space is much smaller than the real address space
D. when the system is ready to run a process, the system loads the process’s code and data from main memory into cache

When a page references a page that is not in main memory, the processor generates a(n) ________.
A. TLB miss
B. general protection fault
C. missing-segment fault
D. page fault

Virtual memory fetch strategies determine when a page or segment should be moved from ________ to ________.

A. the TLB, registers
B. main memory, secondary storage
C. main memory, the TLB
D. secondary storage, main memory

A FIFO page-replacement strategy can be implemented with relatively low overhead using a ________.

A. binary tree
B. queue
C. hash table
D. stack