Operating System Interview Questions and Answers
Ques 16. What is DRAM? In which form does it store data?
DRAM is not the best, but it's cheap, does the job, and is available almost everywhere you look. DRAM data resides in a cell made of a capacitor and a transistor. The capacitor tends to lose data unless it's recharged every couple of milliseconds, and this recharging tends to slow down the performance of DRAM compared to speedier RAM types.
Ques 17. What is the Dispatcher?
Dispatcher module gives control of the CPU to the process selected by the short-term scheduler; this involves: Switching context, Switching to user mode, Jumping to the proper location in the user program to restart that program,
dispatch latency : time it takes for the dispatcher to stop one process and start another running.
Ques 18. What is the CPU Scheduler?
Selects from among the processes in memory that are ready to execute, and allocates the CPU to one of them. CPU scheduling decisions may take place when a process:
1.Switches from running to waiting state.
2.Switches from running to ready state.
3.Switches from waiting to ready.
4.Terminates. Scheduling under 1 and 4 is non-preemptive. All other scheduling is preemptive.
Ques 19. What is the Context Switch?
Switching the CPU to another process requires saving the state of the old process and loading the saved state for the new process. This task is known as a context switch. Context-switch time is pure overhead, because the system does no useful work while switching. Its speed varies from machine to machine, depending on the memory speed, the number of registers which must be copied, the existed of special instructions(such as a single instruction to load or store all registers).
Ques 20. What is the cache memory?
Cache memory is random access memory (RAM) that a computer microprocessor can access more quickly than it can access regular RAM. As the microprocessor processes data, it looks first in the cache memory and if it finds the data there (from a previous reading of data), it does not have to do the more time-consuming reading of data from larger memory.
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