OOP

Q. What do you mean by process management? What are the five major activities of an operating system in regard to process management?
Ans: Process management: A process is a program in execution. A process is an active entity and also passive entity. A single threaded process has one program counter specifying the next instruction to execute. The execution of such a process must be sequential. A process is the unit of work in a system. Such a system consists of a collection of processes, some of which are operating system processes and the rest of which are user processes.
The operating system is responsible for the following activities in connection with process management:
a. Creating and deleting both user and system processes.
b. Suspending and resuming processes.
c. Providing mechanisms for process synchronization.
d. Providing mechanisms for process communication.
e. Providing mechanisms for process deadlock handling.
Q. What are the three major activities of an operating system in regard to memory management?
Ans: The three major activities of an operating system in regard to main memory management are –
a. Keep track of which parts of memory are currently being used and by whom.
b. Decide which processes are to be loaded into memory when memory space becomes available.
c. Allocate and deallocate memory space as needed.
Q. What do you mean by file system management? What are the major activities of an operating system in regard to file management?
Ans: File system management: The operating system abstracts from the physical properties of its storage devices to define a logical storage unit, the file. Files are mapped by the OS onto physical devices. A file is a collection of related information defined by its creator. Files represent programs and data. Data files may be numeric, alphabetic, alphanumeric or binary. Files may be free form or they may be formatted rigidly.
The operating system in responsible for the following activities in connection with file management:
a. Creating and deleting files.
b. Creating and deleting directories to organize files.
c. Supporting primitives for manipulating files and directories.
d. Mapping files onto secondary storage.
e. Backing up files on stable storage media.
Q. What are the major activities of an operating system in regard to secondary storage management?
Ans: The major activities of an operating system in regard to secondary storage management are –
a. Free space management.
b. Storage allocation.
c. Disk scheduling.
Q. What do you mean by I/O system management? Write the activities of I/O system management.
Ans: The I/O system consists of several components:
A buffer caching system.
A general device driver interface.
Drivers for specific hardware devices.
Activities: To hide the peculiarities of specific hardware devices from the user. For example, in UNIX, the peculiarities of I/O devices are hidden from the bulk of the operating system itself by the I/O subsystem.