UNIT-IV

Q.1 List out any two disk scheduling techniques.

Ans. Disk scheduling techniques are FCFS, SSTF, SCAN and C-SCAN.
Q.2 Define seek-time and latency time for a hard-disk (HDD) mechanism
Ans.Latency time: It is the time spent waiting for the target sector to appear under
the read and write head.
Q.3 Seek time: Seek time is the time required to move the disk arm to the
required
Q.4 In the context of disk reliability define mirroring.
Ans. A mirror set comprises two equal sized partitions on two disks. When an
application writes data to a mirror set, FtDisk writes contents of the two partitions
are identical.
Q.5 What is the need for disk scheduling ?
Ans. For a multiprogramming system with many processes, the disk queue may
often have several pending requests. Thus, when one request is completed, the OS
chooses which pending request to service next. To reduce seek time and increase
disk bandwidth, disk scheduling is required.
Q.6 Why is rotational latency usually not considered in disk scheduling ?
Ans. It is additional time waiting for the disk to rotate the desired sector to the disk
head.
Q.7 What is rotational latency?
Ans. The time to wait for the target sector to rotate underneath the head.
Q.8 What is a swap space?ells
Ans.
Secondary memory is swap device and the section of disk used for this purpose is
known as swap space.
Q.9 Write the three basic functions which are provided by the hardware
clocks and timers.
Ans. Three basic functions are :
1. Give the current time.
2. Give the elapsed time.
3. Set a timer to trigger operation X at time T.
Q.10 What are seek time and rotational latency ?
Ans: Seek time: It is a time required to move the disk arm to the required track.
Rotational latency: It is time spent waiting for the target sector to appear under the
read and write heads.
Q.11 Define mirroring and shadowing.
Ans: Mirroring: Mirroring is the replication of logical disk volumes onto separate
physical hard disks in real time to ensure continuous availability. Mirroring is also
called shadowing.
Q.12 Which disk scheduling algorithm would be best to optimize the
performance of a RAM disk ?
Ans. : RAM disk has uniform access times. So all disk scheduling algorithm gives
same effect.
Q.13 Writable CD-ROM media are available in both 650 MB and 700 MB
versions. What is the principle disadvantage, other than cost, of the 700 MB
version ?
Ans.Limited space is disadvantage of 700 MB versions.
Q.14 What characteristics determine the disk access speed?
Ans.Rotational delay and seek time.
Q.15 Give the importance of swap-space management.
Ans. Importance of swap space management is to provide the best throughput for
the virtual memory system.
Q.16 Explain difference between latency and throughput. du
Ans. Latency is defined as the time required processing a single instruction, while
throughput is defined as the number of instructions processed per second.
Q.17 What is cylinder ?
Ans. Cylinder is used to refer to all the tracks under the arms at a given points on
all surfaces.
Q.18 What is bandwidth ?
Ans. The maximum amount of information that can be transferred to or from the
memory per unit time is called bandwidth.
Q.19 Define constant linear velocity.
Ans. The Constant Linear Velocity (CLV) format optimizes utilization of the
usable recording area by having an uniform recording density throughout the disk.
By maintaining the linear velocity constant, the recording density is kept constant.
Data are stored in one continuous track that spirals from the circumference inwards
to the centre. As the tracks moves inwards, the radius decreases and to maintain the
same linear velocity the disk must spin faster.
Q.20 What is SCAN disk scheduling ?
Ans. The disk arm starts at one end of the disk, and moves toward the other end,
servicing requests until it gets to the other end of the disk, where the head
movement is reversed and servicing continues.
Q.21 What are the two major components of access time ?
Ans. Two components are:
a. Seek time is the time for the disk are to move the heads to the cylinder
containing the desired sector.
b. Rotational latency is the additional time waiting for the disk to rotate the desired
sector to the disk head.
Q.22 What is the difference between block-oriented devices and stream-
oriented devices?
Ans. Block-oriented devices stores information in blocks that are usually of fixed
size, and transfers are made one block at a time. Generally, it is possible to
reference data by its block number. Disks and tapes are examples of block-oriented
devices. Stream-oriented devices transfer data in and out as a stream of bytes, with
no block structure. Terminals, printers, communications ports, mouse and other
pointing devices, and most other devices that are not secondary storage are stream
oriented.
Q.23 What are the device drivers ?
Ans. A device driver is a program that controls a particular type of device that is
attached to your computer. There are device drivers for printers, displays, CD-
ROM readers, diskette drives and so on.
Q.24 What is tertiary storage ?
Ans. Tertiary storage is built from disk and tape drives that use removable media.
Low cost is the defining characteristic of tertiary storage.
Q.25 What is trap?
Ans. A trap is a software generated interrupt caused either by an error or by a
specific request from a user program that an operating system service be
performed.
Q.26 What do you mean by WORM disk ?
Ans. WORM means "Write Once, Read Many Times" disks can be written only
once. Thin aluminum film sandwiched between two glass or plastic platters. To
write a bit, the drive uses a laser light to burn a small hole through the aluminum;
information can be destroyed by not altered.
Q.27 Give the various disk scheduling methods.
Ans.1. FCFS 2. SSTF 3. SCAN 4. C-SCAN 5. LOOK 6. C-LOOK.
Q.28 What is HSM? Where it is used?
Ans. Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is a data storage techniques
automatically moves data between high-cost and low-cost storage media. HSM
systems store the bulk of the enterprise's data on slower devices and then copy data
to faster disk drives when needed.
Q.29 How does DMA increase system concurrency?
Ans. DMA increases system concurrency by allowing the CPU to perform tasks
while the DMA system transfers data via the system and memory buses.
Q.30 Define C-SCAN scheduling.
Ans.Head begins its scan toward the nearest end and works it way all the way to
the end of the system. Once it hits the bottom or top it jumps to the other end and
moves in the same direction
Q.31 Why is it important to scale up system-bus and device speeds as CPU
speed increases?
Ans. Consider a system which performs 50 % I/O and 50 % computes. Doubling
the CPU performance on this system would increase total system performance by
only 50 %. Doubling both system aspects would increase performance by 100 %.
Generally, it is important to remove the current system bottleneck and to increase
overall system performance rather than blindly increasing the performance of
individual system components.
Q.32 Suppose that the disk rotates at 7200 RPM. What is the average
rotational latency of this disk drive? AU CSE: May-17
Ans. Disk rotates at 7200 rpm which gives 120 rotations per second. One rotation
= 60s / 7200 = 8.33 ms Thus, a full rotation takes 8.33 ms and the average
rotational latency (a half rotation) takes 4.167 ms.
Q.33 What is SSD?
Ans. Solid State Disks (SSD) is a storage device that is based on semiconductors
rather than rotating magnetic platters. It uses serial ATA or IDE interface as hard
drives. Most SSDs are based on NAND flash chips.

FILE SYSTEM

Q.1 What are the essential requirements for long term information
Ans. Name, type, location, size, protection and time, date for file.
Q.2 State the typical bad sector transactions.
Ans. :
a. O.S. tries to read logical block 87.
b. The controller calculates the ECC and finds that the sector is bad. It reports this
finding to the O.S.
c. Next time the system is rebooted, a special command is run to tell the SCSI
controller to replace the bad sector with a spare.
d. After that, whenever the system requests logical block 87, the request is
translated into the replacement sectors address by the controller.
Q.3 What are link and unlink directory operations?
Ans. Link Links a file to a new name in the file system directory structure, creating
a new directory entry for an existing node.
Unlink : It removes a directory entry for a file.
Q.4 What data type is file ?
Ans. A file is an abstract data type.
Q.5 Give an example of an application that could benefit from operating
system support for random access to indexed files.
Ans: An application that maintains a database of entries could benefit from such
support. For instance, if a program is maintaining a student database, then accesses
to the database cannot be modeled by any predetermined access pattern. The
accesses to records are random and locating the records would be more efficient if
the operating system were to provide some form of tree based index.
Q.6 What is the content of a typical file control block ?
Ans. FCB contains in formation about the file, including ownership, permissions
and location of the file contents.
Q.7 What are the functions of file organization module in file system?
Ans. File organization module can translate logical block addresses to physical
block addresses for the basic file system to transfer.
Q.8 Discuss about file descriptor and access control matrix.
Ans. Protection mechanisms provide controlled access by limiting the types of file
access that can be made. Protection can be viewed abstractly as a matrix, called an
access control matrix. A file descriptor is an index into a small table of open files
for the process. Descriptors start at 0 and seldom get higher than 6 or 7 for
programs, depending on the maximum number of simultaneously open files typical
Q.9 What is a file? List some operations on it.
Ans. File is an unstructured sequence of data, File operations are read, write,
create, delete etc.
Q.10 What are the various file accessing methods?
Ans. Sequential access, direct, indexed etc.
Q.11 Write the attributes of a file.
Ans. Name, identifier, type, location, size, time and date.
Q.12 Mention any four file attributes.
Ans. Name, type, size and location.
Q.13 Differentiate absolute path from relative path.
Ans. An absolute path name begins at the root and follows a path down to the
specified file, giving the directory names on the path. A relative path name defines
a path from the current directory.
Q.14 What are the two types of system directories ?
Ans.A tree structured directory that allows a user to create subdirectories to
organize the files.
A general graph structure that allows complete flexibility in the sharing of files and
directories.
Q.15 What is garbage collection?
Ans. Garbage collection is the process of automatically freeing objects that are no
longer referenced by the program.
Q.16 Mention the major attributes and operations of a file.
Ans. Major attributes of file is name, identification, type, location, size and
protection. Operation on a file is to create, write, read, reposition, delete and
truncate files.
Q.17 What is meant by free-space management ?
Ans. To keep track of free disk space, the system maintains a free space list. Free
space list. Free space list records all free disks blocks i.e. those not allocated to
some file or directory.
Q.18 Name any four common file types.
Ans.File types are text file, source file, object file and executable file.
Q.19 What is NFS ?
Ans. The Network File System (NFS) is probably the most prominent network
service using RPC. It allows you to access files on remote hosts in exactly the
same way you would access local files. A mixture of kernel support and user-space
daemons on the client side, along with an NFS server on the server side, makes this
possible. This file access is completely transparent t to the client and works across
Q.20 What is virtual file system? W
Ans. Virtual File Systems (VFS) provide an object-oriented way of implementing
file systems. VFS allows the same system call interface to be used for different
types of the systems.
Q.21 Write short note on file system mounting.
Ans. Mounting a file system, means taking that storage and connecting it to the
operating system in a way that it's usable as a hierarchical storage device with
directories and files. This could be the initial file system or another file system that
connects to the root file system at a mount point.
Q.22 What is file management system ?
Ans. File management system consists of system utility programs that run as
privileged applications. The way a user or application may access files and
programmer does not need to develop file management software.
Q.23 What are the disadvantages of log structured file systems?
Ans. It requires cleaning demon to produce clean space, which takes additional
CPU time. Reads that are not handled by buffer cache are same performance as
normal file system.
Q.24 List the objectives for a file management system.
Ans.Objectives are :
1. Meet the data management needs and requirements of the users
2. Guarantee that the data in the file are valid
3. Optimize performance
4. Provide I/O support for a variety of storage device types
5. Provide I/O support for multiple users.
Q.25 What is a file management system ?
Ans. It is a set of system software that provide services to user and applications in
the use of files.
Q.26 What are the disadvantages of log-structured file systems ?
Ans. It decreases head contention and seek times.
Q.27 Define log structured file.
Ans. Log structured file is used for file system meta data updates.
Q.28 List out the major attributes and operations of a file.
Ans.
Attributes of file: Name, identifier, type, location and size.
Operation on file : read, write, create, delete.
Q.29 Do FAT file system is advantageous? Why?
Ans. The FAT file system protects files by storing two copies of the file allocation
table on the FAT volume. FAT contains the FAT structure, which is a map of the
data region. File size is no longer fixed. We do not need to know the size of the file
at the beginning.
Q.30 Identify the two important functions of Virtual File System (VFS) layer
in the concept of file system implementation.
Ans. : Two important functions :
1. It separates file system generic operations from their implementation by defining
a clean VFS interface.
2. VFS provides a mechanism for uniquely representing a file throughout a
network.
Q.31 Differentiate between file and directory.
Ans. The basic difference between the two is that files store data, while directory
store files and other directory. File is a sequence of logical records. Directory lists
the file by name and includes the file location on the disk, length, type etc.
Q.32 Write about swapping. Let us assume the user process is of size 1 MB
and the backing store is a standard hard disk with a transfer rate of 6 MBPS.
Calculate the transfer rate.
Ans. :

Q.33 What is the advantages of bit vector approach in free space management
Ans.: Advantages: It is simple and its efficiency in finding the first free block on
the disk is high.