CS414 Prelim #2 Study Guide      Fall 2000

the material covered in the second prelim is given in the PREPARATION SECTION

DATE   Tuesday, Nov 30, 2000
(we will send you your grade by e-mail on or before Dec 5; see grading policy for details.)

ROOMS

• The exam will take place in the UH AUD, starting at 7:30pm.  Please come a little earlier to settle in.

FORMAT

• Answer questions with short answers, solve problems
• Closed notes, closed book

PREPARATION

• Review lecture notes
• Review homeworks (#3-5) and solutions
• Review handouts and review questions
• Go to review sessions scheduled for Nov 28 and Nov 30
• Study textbook, chapters 8-13, and 15, except sections 9.9, 10.511.3, 11.4, 11.6

SUBJECTS

• IO systems: interrupts, structure of the hardware and how the OS interacts with the hardware
• Memory management: how the memory is allocated, de-allocated, replaced, read from / written to disks, shared, translated (virtual to physical address)
• Virtual Memory:
• paging
• segmentation
• translation tables
• page replacement algos
• performance (thrashing, influence of VM in multiprogramming, woking sets, etc)
• File Systems:
• concept of files, how they are logically structured
• mapping of the logical address to physical address
• physical allocation of blocks on disk
• DMAs
• Networks: topologies and their advantages/disadvantages with respect to the different costs, routing and connection strategies, contention/detection and resolution, and the ISO model (all the layers, but focusing on the lower 4 layers)

KNOW WHAT THE FOLLOWING MEAN AND WHY THEY ARE USEFUL OR IMPORTANT

• pages, page tables, segments, segment tables and combinations thereof.
• Programmable interrup controller, means to recognize and process interrupts.
• First-fit, last-fit, next-fit, best-fit
• internal and external fragmentation
• thrashing, multiprogramming degree
• disk delays (seek, rotational, transfer) and disk hardware (head, arm, track, etc)
• DMA
• packet-, message, circuit switching; fixed, virtual, dynamic routing
• physical, data link, network, transport layers

UNDERSTAND THE TRADEOFFS

• polling vs interrupt-driven systems
• paging vs segmentation
• different topologies for network interconnections
• different allocation types for files and for memory
• multiple levels of page/segmentation tables
• packet-, message, circuit switching
• fixed, virtual, dynamic routing

BE ABLE TO USE OR DO OR RECOGNIZE THE FOLLOWING

• page/segment table and associated translations
• different disk scheduling algorithms
• different page replacement algorithms
• different allocation schemes (memory, files)