Marquette University

Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science

Wim Ruitenburg's MSCS 206 EX2 sample problems

Exam 2 covers, from the first book, Chapter 4 sections 4.1 through 4.5, 4.7, and 4.8; Chapter 8 pages 376 through 385, pages 391 through 393, page 398, and pages 400 through 402. From the second book it covers Chapter 1.
  1. (Imagine you have the inside cover pictures available). Describe a concrete RTN for the sub instruction (with steps T0, T1, etc.).
  2. (Imagine you have the inside cover pictures available). Describe a control sequence list for the not function (with steps T0, T1, etc.).
  3. (Imagine you have the inside cover pictures available). Describe a control sequence list for the shr function (with steps T0, T1, etc.).
  4. (Imagine you have the Processor Interrupt Mechanism RTN table of page 186). Give a brief description of how an exception is being processed by the SRC.
  5. Compare the three I/O bus structures of (a) isolated I/O, (b) shared address and data I/O, and (c) memory-mapped I/O.
  6. Interrrupt exception vectors of the SRC use `low' addresses in the range 00000000H to 00000FFFH; memory mapped registers of the SRC are allocated to `high' addresses in the range FFFFF000H to FFFFFFFFH. Why? (This has a very simple and short answer).
  7. (Imagine you have FIGURE 8.5 of page 382). What is the maximum number of different address decoders that the SRC can handle, and why?
  8. Explain, with picture, how synchronous data transfer works.
  9. Explain, with picture, how semisynchronous data transfer works.
  10. Explain, with picture, how asynchronous data transfer works.
  11. The book gives four examples of operating system structures, (1) monolithic systems; (2) layered systems; (3) virtual machines; and (4) the client-server model. Give a description of two of these (you can decide for yourself which two) and accentuate their differences.
  12. Explain how fork() works. Give a good example.
  13. Explain how execve() works. Give a good example.
  14. Explain how dup() works. Give a good example.
  15. Explain how pipe() works. Give a good example.
Last updated: November 1998
Comments & suggestions: wimr@mscs.mu.edu