Description
Each problem is worth 5 points. Submit your hardcopy solution
1. Suppose a computer system and all of its applications are completely bug free. Suppose further thateveryone in the world is completely honest and trustworthy. In other words, we do not need to considerfault isolation.(a) How should the operating system allocate time on the processor? Should it give all of the processorto each application until it no longer needs it? If there are multiple tasks ready to go at the sametime, should it schedule the task with the least amount of work to do or the one with the most?Justify your answer.(b) How should the operating system allocate physical memory between applications? What shouldhappen if the set of applications do not all fit in memory at the same time?(c) How should the operating system allocate its disk space? Should the first user to ask be able tograb all of the free space? What would the likely outcome be for that policy?2. Now suppose the computer system needs to support fault isolation. What hardware and/or operatingsupport do you think would be needed to accomplish this goal?(a) For protecting an application’s data structures in memory from being corrupted by other applica-tions?(b) For protecting one user’s disk files from being accessed or corrupted by another user?(c) For protecting the network from a virus trying to use your computer to send spam?3. For the computer you are currently using, how should the operating system designers prioritize amongreliability, security, portability, performance, and adoption? Explain why.4. For each of the three mechanisms for supporting dual mode operations—privileged instructions, memoryprotection, and timer interrupts — explain what might go wrong without that mechanism, assuming thesystem still had the other two.5. Define three styles of switching from user-mode to kernel-mode, and four styles of switching from kernel-mode to user-mode.6. Which of the following components is responsible for loading the initial value in the program counter foran application program before it starts running: the compiler, the linker, the kernel, or the boot ROM?7. Explain the steps that an operating system goes through when the CPU receives an interrupt.8. Can UNIX fork return an error? Why or why not?9. Can UNIX exec return an error? Why or why not?10. What happens if we run the following program on UNIX?main() {while (fork() = 0);}11. Explain what must happen for UNIX wait to return (successfully and) immediately.112. What happens if you run “exec csh” in the UNIX shell? Why?13. What happens if you run “exec ls” in the UNIX shell? Why?14. Consider the following program:main(int argc, char** argv) {forkthem(5);}void forkthem(int n) {if (n 0) {fork();forkthem(n-1);}}How many processes are created if the above piece of code is run?15. Consider the following program:main(int argc, char** argv) {int child = fork();int x = 5;if (child == 0) {x += 5;} else {child = fork();x += 10;if (child) {x += 5;}}}How many different copies of the variable x are there? What are their values when their process finishes?16. Download this example code at the following URL:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/osbook/code/threadHello.chttp://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/osbook/code/sthread.chttp://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/osbook/code/sthread.hCompile the code and run it several times. What output do you get if you run it? Do you get the sasmething if you run it multiple times? What if you are also running some other demanding processes (e.g.compiling a big program, playing a Flash game on the Web, or watching streaming video) when you runthis program?17. For the threadHello program, what is the maximum number of threads that could exist while the programis running?218. For the threadHello program, suppose that we delete the second for loop so that the main routine simplycreates NTHREADS threads and then prints “Main thread done.”. What are the possible outputs ofthe program now? Hint: Fewer than NTHREADS+1 lines may be printed in some runs. Why?19. For the threadHello program, the procedure go() has the parameter np and the local variable n. Arethese variables per thread or shared state? Where does the compiler store these variables’ states?20. For the threadHello program, the procedure main() has local variables such as ii, err, and status. Arethese variables per thread or shared state? Where does the compiler store these variables’ states?3
