500-4 Yhtomit

Module 4 Study Guide

Here are questions you should be able to answer after studying this week's material.

These questions are highly representative of the questions you will see on your mid-term exam.

· Explain in your own words the purpose of an operating system.

· Explain how memory was divided in old dedicated processing operating systems.

· Explain how partitioning enables a multiprogramming operating system to appear to process multiple tasks simultaneously.

· How does spooling speed up system performance?

· How is a non-preemptive task handled differently by a computer than a preemptive task?

· What is a drawback of the FIFO scheduling method, and how does Round Robin scheduling address it?

· Name and describe four different scheduling methods.

· Explain the need for virtual memory.

· How is virtual memory managed? Be sure to discuss the concept of "pages" in your answer.

· What is a "virtual machine"?

· Explain how logical partitioning (LPAR) is used by virtual machines.

· Identify and briefly describe at least three major operating systems in the history of computer systems.

· What is the purpose of operating system kernel?

· Explain what you would look for in evaluating the security of an operating system.