CS 3204 Spring 2007 Midterm Preparation
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Date: Thursday, Mar 29
9:30am to 10:45am
Location: MCB 307 (usual classroom)
Format:
The midterm exam will consist of 3-5 questions.
It will be closed book, closed notes, closed computer/without
wireless access. However, you are allowed to bring one letter-
sized sheet of paper with prepared notes (you may use front and
back of that sheet.)
You are responsible for the content of lectures 1 through 16 (up to
including the Mar 15 lecture.) This includes, among others:
๎ Introduction to OS: general goals & principles of operating
systems.
๎ Multiprogramming basics: protection, dual-mode operation,
system calls and exceptions. Linking and loading.
๎ Threads & processes: context switching, mode switching,
procedure switching, context management, threading & process
APIs.
๎ Concurrency & Synchronization: critical section problem, race
conditions, approaches for guaranteeing mutual exclusion,
including locks, semaphores, monitors, spinlocks & disabling
interrupts.
๎ Deadlock: conditions, detection & recovery.
๎ Scheduling: general goals & constraints, priority scheduling,
FCFS, RR, SPN, MLFQS, Lottery Scheduling.
Our textbook covers this material in Chapters 1, 2, 3.1-3.5, 5, 6.1-
6.8, and 7.
The midterm may also contain questions related to projects 0, 1,
and 2.
There are sample midterms posted on the class website you may
find useful.