Here are some sample midterm questions.
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The term "spooling" means
A. Using the same CPU for loading jobs from cards and processing jobs.
B. Using a spool of tape for I/O.
C. Structured Programming in an Object-Oriented Language.
D. Using different disk drives for data and programs.
E. Using the same disk drive for input and output.
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In Hoare's version of monitors (with signal and wait), the signal operation can
block the caller
A. If there are no processes blocked on a wait .
B. If there are two processes blocked on a wait .
C. If the signal call is not inside a critical section.
D. Never.
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In the context of this course, a PCB is
A. An environmental contaminant.
B. A kind of queue.
C. A machine instruction.
D. A message-passing primitive.
E. A data structure containing information about a process.
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Why might a "busy wait" synchronization algorithm be bad?
[True/False] It may cause the CPU to overheat.
[True/False] It causes memory contention with other processes.
[True/False] It needlessly ties up a CPU.
[True/False] It responds too slowly to events.
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Consider the following Unix program.
    ...
Depending on the exact, unpredictable timing of events, this program
may produce several different outputs.
Indicate which of the following sequences of numbers may be the output of this
program.
    1 1 7 2
    1 2 1 2 1 2 ... (an infinite loop)
    1 7 2 2
    1 7 1 2
    1 8 7 2
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A system has three classes of resource: A, B, and C.
Initially, there are 8 units of A and 7 units each of resources B and C.
There are five processes that have declared their maximum demands, and have
been allocated some resources as follows:
    ...
For each of the following requests, indicate whether the
request can be safely granted.
    ...
Process 2 requests one unit of resource B and two units of resource C.
A. Request granted
B. Request delayed (insufficient resources to grant request)
C. Request delayed (state would be unsafe)
D. Request rejected (illegal request)
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Consider the following jobs:
    ...
With FCFS scheduling, the penalty ratio time for job C is
A. 1
B. 3
C. 1/2
D. 8/3
E. 5/4