Operating system questions

Operating system

Answer the following five questions. It is important that you answer these questions in your own words to demonstrate that you understand the concepts involved; very few marks will be awarded for simply repeating statements from the lecture notes alone. You should aim to make your answers as succinct as you can while still including the important facts. No more than half a page of text is expected for each question.

Q1. Describe in your own words the basic idea of RAID storage and the reasons why it is used. Explain both mirroring and parity in your answer.

Q2. Describe in your own words what DNS is for and how it works in principle, without caching and how it works in practice with caching.

Q3. Describe in your own words what virtual memory is, why it is necessary and how it works in practice, including explanations of pages, frames and page faults.

Q4. Describe in your own words the relationship between Threads and Processes explaining how they differ from each other and the advantages and disadvantages each present.

Q5. Describe in your own words how data is stored on a hard disk drive, how it is addressed and where the data for a particular file could be located. Explain both file fragmentation and disk fragmentation in your answer.