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    OS Concepts Chapter 2 Solution To Exercises Part 1

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    Alfred Fred
    The document discusses solutions to exercises about operating system concepts. It covers two main categories of operating system services: 1) enforcing protection between concurrent processes and 2) providing new functionality not directly supported by hardware, like virtual memory and file systems. It also describes three methods for passing parameters to the operating system, how to obtain a statistical profile of program execution time, the five major file management activities of an operating system, and the advantages and disadvantages of using the same system call interface for files and devices.

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    OS Concepts Chapter 2 Solution To Exercises Part 1

    Uploaded by

    Alfred Fred
    1K views2 pages
    The document discusses solutions to exercises about operating system concepts. It covers two main categories of operating system services: 1) enforcing protection between concurrent processes and 2) providing new functionality not directly supported by hardware, like virtual memory and file systems. It also describes three methods for passing parameters to the operating system, how to obtain a statistical profile of program execution time, the five major file management activities of an operating system, and the advantages and disadvantages of using the same system call interface for files and devices.

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    OS Concepts Chapter 2 Solution to Exercises Part 1

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    OS Concepts Chapter 2 Solution to Exercises Part 1

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    The document discusses solutions to exercises about operating system concepts. It covers two main categories of operating system services: 1) enforcing protection between concurrent processes and 2) providing new functionality not directly supported by hardware, like virtual memory and file systems. It also describes three methods for passing parameters to the operating system, how to obtain a statistical profile of program execution time, the five major file management activities of an operating system, and the advantages and disadvantages of using the same system call interface for files and devices.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    1K views2 pages

    OS Concepts Chapter 2 Solution To Exercises Part 1

    Uploaded by

    Alfred Fred
    The document discusses solutions to exercises about operating system concepts. It covers two main categories of operating system services: 1) enforcing protection between concurrent processes and 2) providing new functionality not directly supported by hardware, like virtual memory and file systems. It also describes three methods for passing parameters to the operating system, how to obtain a statistical profile of program execution time, the five major file management activities of an operating system, and the advantages and disadvantages of using the same system call interface for files and devices.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 2

    Solution to Exercises

    2.12The services and functions provided by an operating system can be divided into two
    main categories. Briefly describe the two categories and discuss how they differ.
    Answer:
    One class of services provided by an operating system is to enforce protection between
    different processes running concurrently in the system. Processes are allowed to access
    only those memory locations that are associated with their address spaces.
    Also, processes are not allowed to corrupt files associated with other users. A process is
    also not allowed to access devices directly without operating system intervention. The
    second class of services provided by an operating system is to provide new functionality
    that is not supported directly by the underlying hardware. Virtual memory and file
    systems are two such examples of new services provided by an operating system.
    2.13 Describe three general methods for passing parameters to the operating system.
    Answer:
    a. Pass parameters in registers
    b. Registers pass starting addresses of blocks of parameters
    c. Parameters can be placed, or pushed, onto the stack by the program, and popped off the
    stack by the operating system
    2.14 Describe how you could obtain a statistical profile of the amount of time
    spent by a program executing different sections of its code. Discuss the importance of
    obtaining such a statistical profile.
    Answer:
    One could issue periodic timer interrupts and monitor what instructions or what sections
    of code are currently executing when the interrupts are delivered. A statistical profile of
    which pieces of code were active should be consistent with the time spent by the program
    in different sections of its code. Once such a statistical profile has been obtained, the
    programmer could optimize those sections of code that are consuming more of the CPU
    resources.
    2.15 What are the five major activities of an operating system in regard to file
    management?
    Answer:

    The creation and deletion of files


    The creation and deletion of directories

    The support of primitives for manipulating files and directories


    The mapping of files onto secondary storage
    The backup of files on stable (nonvolatile) storage media
    2.16 What are the advantages and disadvantages of using the same system call interface
    for manipulating both files and devices?
    Answer:
    Each device can be accessed as though it was a file in the file system. Since most of the
    kernel deals with devices through this file interface, it is relatively easy to add a new
    device driver by implementing the hardware-specific code to support this abstract file
    interface.Therefore, this benefits the development of both user program code,which can
    be written to access devices and files in the same manner,and device-driver code, which
    can be written to support a well-defined API .
    The disadvantage with using the same interface is that it might be difficult to capture the
    functionality of certain devices within the context of the file access API, thereby resulting
    in either a loss of functionality or a loss of performance. Some of this could be overcome
    by the use of the ioctl operation that provides a general-purpose interface for processes
    to invoke operations on devices.
    2.17 Would it be possible for the user to develop a new command interpreter using the
    system-call interface provided by the operating system?
    Answer:
    An user should be able to develop a new command interpreter using the system-call
    interface provided by the operating system. The command interpreter allows an user to
    create and manage processes and also determine ways by which they communicate (such
    as through pipes and files). As all of this functionality could be accessed by an userlevel program using the system calls, it should be possible for the user to develop a new
    command-line interpreter.

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