Assignment 1

Total of 50 marks. Answer the following questions.

Treat this assignment as an open-book individual exam. You may consult any of your class notes or other books or documents, paper or electronic. However, you may NOT discuss questions or share answers with any other person until after the assignment is due.

1. What components make up the operating system kernel? [5]
2. Rank the following in terms of speed, fastest to slowest: I/O devices, processor, main memory, registers, secondary storage, users. [3]
3. What names are given to operating systems that have the following? [5]
   1. more than one user
   2. more than one job submitted at a time
   3. more than one program in memory at a time
   4. more than one process sharing the processor
   5. more than one processor
4. What is the difference between a system call and an interrupt? [4]
5. List three reasons a system administrator would need to create a file using a command language.
   What are two names for these files? [5]
6. What type of user interface is used to control the computer by typing a line of text at a prompt?
   What do DOS and UNIX use to make sense of what the user typed? [3]
7. What are the purposes of command switches? [2]
8. What is a search path? [2]
9. How could you use UNIX system calls to start a new program? [2]
10. What factors are considered when scheduling a job using job control language? [5]
11. Briefly explain the use of the process stack. [2]
12. Give two similarities and two differences between a process and a thread.[4]
13. What properties of processes determine which process should use the CPU next? [5]
14. List three types of code files which can be present in memory on a computer running Windows. [3]