Quiz #3

1. What are the major activities of an Operating System with regards to process management?

The Operating System is responsible for the following activities in connection with process management:

• Process creation an deletion.
• Process suspension and resumption.
• Provision of mechanisms for: process synchronization, process communication, deadlock handling

2. What are the major activities of an Operating System with regards to main memory management?

The following are some of the activities in connections with memory managemen that are handled by Operating System:

• Keep track of which parts of memory are currently being used and by whom
• Decide which processes to load when memory space becomes available.
• Allocate and deallocate memory space as needed.

3. What are the major activities of an Operating System with regards to secondary storage management?

The Operating System is responsible for the following activities in connection with disk management:

• Free space management.
• Storage allocation.
• Disk scheduling.

4. What are the major activities of an Operating System with regards to file management?

The Operating System is responsible for the following activities in connection with file management:

• File creation and deletion.
• Directory creation and deletion.
• Support of primitives for manipulating files and directories.
• Mapping files into secondary storage.
• File backup on stable (nonvolatile) storage media.

5. What is the purpose of the command interpreter?

Serves as the interface between the user and the Operating System

• User friendly, mouse based windows environment in the Macintosh and in Microsoft Windows.
• In MS-DOS and UNIX, commands are typed on a keyboard and displayed on a screen or pronting terminal with the Enter ot Return key indicating that a command is compplete and ready to be executed.

Many commands are given to the Operating Sysytem by control statements which deal with:

• process creation and mangement
• I/O handling
• secondary-storage management
• main-memory management
• file-system access
• protection
• networking