Operating System

Earlier, i listed few of the good and highly interesting RTOS queries for discussion. Here, i am listing general Operating System based interview questions that can be discussed upon.

1. What is an interrupt Vector ?
2. How CPUs find the ISR and distinguish between the various devices ?
Is it possible for two devices to share an interrupt request line but have different ISR for those two devices ?
3. What is page fault ?
4. Which hardware unit of processor detects the page fault ?
5. Difference between Monolithic kernel, Micro kernel and Hybrid kernel ?
6. What is Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT) ?
7. Main Difference between a process and thread ?
8. Threads are lightweight. Why and How ?
9. STACK growth is in downward direction in the case of 80x86 processor - True/False.
10. What is the difference between Multiprogramming and Multiprocessing ?
11. What is parallel programming ?
12. What is a time slice ?
13. What is the difference between multiprogramming and multiprocessing ?
14. What is parallel programming ?
15. What is ABI (Application Binary Interface ) ?
16. What is the layout of a program image in main memory ?
17. What are the types of IPC mechanisms ?
18. Tell about shared memory ? Does it provide locking mechanism ? When is it typically used ?
19. What are the types of synchronization problems and what are the resources that can cause such problems ?
20. What is data race ?
21. What is Indefinite Postponement / Indefinite blocking or starvation ?
22. What is Deadlock ?
23. What are the synchronization relationships that are present in a multithreaded or mulitprogramming applications ?
24. How Many Processes or Threads Are Enough for an application ?
25. How does memory segmentation help in memory protection ?