Q. Which of the following statements about synchronous and asynchronous I/O is NOT true?

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Q. Consider a disk pack with 16 surfaces, 128 tracks per surface and 256 sectors per track. 512 bytes of data are stored in a bit serial manner in a sector. The capacity of the disk pack and the number of bits required to specify a particular sector in the disk are respectively:

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Q. Suppose a disk has 201 cylinders, numbered from 0 to 200. At some time the disk arm is at cylinder 100, and there is a queue of disk access requests for cylinders 30, 85, 90, 100, 105, 110, 135 and 145. If Shortest-Seek Time First (SSTF) is being used for scheduling the disk access, the request for cylinder 90 is serviced after servicing ____________ number of requests.

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Q. A device with data transfer rate 10 KB/sec is connected to a CPU. Data is transferred byte-wise. Let the interrupt overhead be 4 msec. The byte transfer time between the device interface register and CPU or memory is negligible. What is the minimum performance gain of operating the device under interrupt mode over operating it under program controlled mode?

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Q. Consider a disk drive with the following specifications: 16 surfaces, 512 tracks/surface, 512 sectors/track, 1 KB/sector, rotation speed 3000 rpm. The disk is operated in cycle stealing mode whereby whenever one byte word is ready it is sent to memory; similarly, for writing, the disk interface reads a 4 byte word from the memory in each DMA cycle. Memory cycle time is 40 nsec. The maximum percentage of time that the CPU gets blocked during DMA operation is:

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Q. Consider an operating system capable of loading and executing a single sequential user process at a time. The disk head scheduling algorithm used is First Come First Served (FCFS). If FCFS is replaced by Shortest Seek Time First (SSTF), claimed by the vendor to give 50% better benchmark results, what is the expected improvement in the I/O performance of user programs?

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Q. A Unix-style i-node has 10 direct pointers and one single, one double and one triple indirect pointers. Disk block size is 1 Kbyte, disk block address is 32 bits, and 48-bit integers are used. What is the maximum possible file size ?

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Q. A hard disk with a transfer rate of 10 Mbytes/ second is constantly transferring data to memory using DMA. The processor runs at 600 MHz, and takes 300 and 900 clock cycles to initiate and complete DMA transfer respectively. If the size of the transfer is 20 Kbytes, what is the percentage of processor time consumed for the transfer operation ?

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Q. Using a larger block size in a fixed block size file system leads to :

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Q. Which of the following requires a device driver?

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Q. A graphics card has on board memory of 1 MB. Which of the following modes can the card not support?

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Q. Consider the situation in which the disk read/write head is currently located at track 45 (of tracks 0-255) and moving in the positive direction. Assume that the following track requests have been made in this order: 40, 67, 11, 240, 87. What is the order in which optimized C-SCAN would service these requests and what is the total seek distance?

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Q. Suppose the following disk request sequence (track numbers) for a disk with 100 tracks is given: 45, 20, 90, 10, 50, 60, 80, 25, 70. Assume that the initial position of the R/W head is on track 50. The additional distance that will be traversed by the R/W head when the Shortest Seek Time First (SSTF) algorithm is used compared to the SCAN (Elevator) algorithm (assuming that SCAN algorithm moves towards 100 when it starts execution) is _________ tracks.

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Q. Consider a disk pack with a seek time of 4 milliseconds and rotational speed of 10000 rotations per minute (RPM). It has 600 sectors per track and each sector can store 512 bytes of data. Consider a file stored in the disk. The file contains 2000 sectors. Assume that every sector access necessitates a seek, and the average rotational latency for accessing each sector is half of the time for one complete rotation. The total time (in milliseconds) needed to read the entire file is _________.

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Q. Consider a typical disk that rotates at 15000 rotations per minute (RPM) and has a transfer rate of 50 × 106 bytes/sec. If the average seek time of the disk is twice the average rotational delay and the controller’s transfer time is 10 times the disk transfer time, the average time (in milliseconds) to read or write a 512 byte sector of the disk is _____________.

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Q. Consider a disk queue with requests for I/O to blocks on cylinders 47, 38, 121, 191, 87, 11, 92, 10. The C-LOOK scheduling algorithm is used. The head is initially at cylinder number 63, moving towards larger cylinder numbers on its servicing pass. The cylinders are numbered from 0 to 199. The total head movement (in number of cylinders) incurred while servicing these requests is:

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Q. Which of the following DMA transfer modes and interrupt handling mechanisms will enable the highest I/O band-width?

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Q. Consider three processes (process id 0, 1, 2 respectively) with compute time bursts 2, 4 and 8 time units. All processes arrive at time zero. Consider the longest remaining time first (LRTF) scheduling algorithm. In LRTF ties are broken by giving priority to the process with the lowest process id. The average turn around time is:

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Q. Consider three processes, all arriving at time zero, with total execution time of 10, 20 and 30 units, respectively. Each process spends the first 20% of execution time doing I/O, the next 70% of time doing computation, and the last 10% of time doing I/O again. The operating system uses a shortest remaining compute time first scheduling algorithm and schedules a new process either when the running process gets blocked on I/O or when the running process finishes its compute burst. Assume that all I/O operations can be overlapped as much as possible. For what percentage of time does the CPU remain idle?

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Q. Consider three CPU-intensive processes, which require 10, 20 and 30 time units and arrive at times 0, 2 and 6, respectively. How many context switches are needed if the operating system implements a shortest remaining time first scheduling algorithm? Do not count the context switches at time zero and at the end.

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