Part 1 : Operating Systems FAQs

Chapter 1 : Common (Wo)Man questions

  1. Why Operating System is needed ?

  2. Why do I need to learn about Operating System ?

  3. What is the connection between CPU and RAM ?

  4. Difference between Linux & Unix

  5. Difference between Linux & Windows

  6. Where is Linux used ?

  7. Difference between micro-kernel and monolithic kernel

  8. Difference between OS and RTOS

  9. Difference between OS and Kernel

Chapter 2 : Boot process

  1. What is Boot Process ?

  2. What is Primary Boot Loader ?

  3. What is Secondary Boot Loader ?

  4. What are different types of Bootloader solutions available ?

  5. Explain Linux Boot process ?

  6. What is BIOS ?

  7. What is MBR ?

  8. What is GRUB ?

  9. What is U-Boot ?

  10. Difference between GRUB and U-Boot ?

Chapter 3 : Compilation stages

  1. Explain stages of compilation

  2. Difference between “Pre-processor” and “Syntax-analyser”

  3. Difference between “Syntax-analyser” and “Semantic-analsyer”

  4. Explain role of “Intermediate code generator”

  5. Explain role of “Assembler”

  6. Explain role of “Linker”

  7. Explain role of “Loader”

  8. What is the memory layout of a running process ?

Chapter 4 : Program execution

  1. What happens when a function is called ?

  2. What is the meaning of “return” statement ?

  3. What is Instruction Pointer ?

  4. What is Stack Pointer ?

  5. What is Stack Frame ?

  6. What is Frame Pointer ?

Chapter 5 : Memory & Memory Management

  1. Difference between RAM & ROM

  2. Difference between SRAM & DRAM

  3. Difference between DDR2 & DDR3

  4. Difference between RAM & Hard-disk

  5. Difference between NAND flash & NOR flash

  6. Difference between virtual memory & physical memory

  7. Difference between L1-Cache and L2-Cache

  8. Difference between Main-memory and Secondary-memory

  9. Difference between Register and Cache

  10. Difference between Memory bus and Data bus

  11. Difference between Memory bus and IO bus

  12. Difference between IO-memory and Main-memory

  13. Difference between 32-bit-OS and 64-bit-OS

  14. Difference between Little-Endian and Big-Endian

  15. What is MMU ?

  16. What is paging ?

  17. What is swap memory ?

  18. What is memory management ?

  19. How does memory management works in MMU less systems ?

  20. Explain demand-paging ?

  21. What is COW bit ?

  22. What is DMA ?

Chapter 6 : CPU

  1. What is a pipeline ?

  2. What is ALU ?

  3. What is an instruction set ?

  4. What are different addressing modes available in x86 ?

  5. What is a instruction Mnemonic ?

Chapter 7 : Scheduling

  1. Difference between Process & Thread

  2. Difference between Mutex & Semaphore

  3. Difference between Blocking IO & Non-blocking IO

  4. Explain in detail “First Come First Serve” Scheduling algorithm

  5. Explain in detail “Shortest Remaining Time” Scheduling algorithm

  6. Explain in detail “Priority Based Scheduling” Scheduling algorithm

  7. Explain in detail “Round-Robin Scheduling” Scheduling algorithm

  8. Explain in detail “Shortest Job First” Scheduling algorithm

  9. Explain in detail “Multiple-Level Queues Scheduling” Scheduling algorithm

  10. What is Deadlock and how is it caused ?

  11. What is time sharing system ?

  12. Difference between Uni-Process and Symmetric-Multi-Processing

  13. What is context switching ?