CSCI 3323 (Principles of Operating Systems), Fall 2014:
Review for Final Exam

Format of the exam

The exam will be at the scheduled time for the course final, December 18 at 3:30pm. The exam will be about twice the length of the first exam (intended to take 75 minutes), but you can use the full three-hour period if you like. Like the quizzes, it is ``open book/notes'', which means you can consult paper or electronic copies of the textbook and your notes, sample solutions from this year only, your own graded work, and anything on the course Web site. You may not use other books, materials from this course from previous years, a calculator or computer (except as needed to consult allowed sources), or (of course) each other's papers. As with the midterm, many questions are likely to be similar in format to those in the quizzes or homework assignments; there will also probably be some multiple-choice or true/false questions. You might be asked to write or comment on code/pseudocode, but it's unlikely that you'll be asked to write more than a few lines. Most questions will be somewhat more difficult than the quiz questions but less difficult (or at least less time-consuming) than the homework problems. There will be some questions on material from the first part of the course (before the midterm), but the emphasis will be on material from the later part of the course.

Lecture topics to review

You are responsible for all material presented during lecture (including any topics not covered in the textbook), but the following is a list of topics I consider most important from the second half of the course. (See the midterm review sheet for a list of topics from the first half.)

• Address space abstraction; virtual (program) addresses versus physical addresses.
• Schemes for managing memory (monoprogramming, multiprogramming with variable partitions, paging, segmentation (very briefly)); advantages and disadvantages of each; implementation details at the level of the homework problems.
• ``Page faults'' (what they are, how they're handled).
• Page replacement algorithms (what they're for, which ones work well and why).
• Filesystem abstraction (files, directories, file types, access methods, etc.).
• Basics of filesystem implementation (ways of allocating space for files and their advantages/disadvantages, disk-space management, reliability issues).
• Basics of I/O hardware (devices, device controllers, I/O ports versus memory-mapped I/O, DMA).
• Goals of I/O software.
• Basics of I/O software (programmed I/O versus interrupt-driven I/O versus I/O using DMA).
• I/O software layers and how they work together.
• Deadlocks (what they are, strategies for avoiding them).
• Security (goals, a little about ways in which systems can be attacked or compromised).

Reading to review

You should have read all of chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and at least skimmed chapters 6 and 9. Probably the best way to approach reviewing the reading is to skim all of it, paying more attention to topics I covered in class, and (re)read the last (summary) section of each chapter.

Other tips

You should also be sure to review all homeworks and quizzes (and sample solutions) and any non-opinion minute essay questions.