Process & Memory Management Flashcards

What is the main advantage of demand paging over loading the entire process into memory?

Answer: It allows larger processes to run than physical memory would otherwise permit

Demand paging loads pages only when accessed, allowing processes whose virtual size exceeds physical RAM to run.

Which type of semaphore allows more than one process to access a resource concurrently?

Answer: Counting semaphore

A counting semaphore is initialized to N and allows up to N processes to hold the resource simultaneously.

In the context of memory management, what is compaction used for?

Answer: Combining multiple free memory fragments into one contiguous block

Compaction shuffles processes in memory to merge scattered free regions into a single large free block.

What distinguishes a daemon process from a regular process?

Answer: Daemons run in the background without a controlling terminal, providing system services

A daemon is a background process detached from any terminal that continuously provides services such as logging or networking.

Which of the following best describes the concept of 'copy-on-write' (COW) in process forking?

Answer: Both parent and child share read-only pages until one modifies a page, triggering a copy

COW defers copying a page until either process writes to it, reducing the overhead of process creation.

What is the purpose of a memory-mapped file?

Answer: To map a file's contents into a process's virtual address space for direct read/write access

Memory-mapped files allow file I/O to be performed through normal memory read/write instructions instead of system calls.

Which CPU scheduling algorithm is most appropriate for a real-time system requiring guaranteed response times?

Answer: Rate Monotonic Scheduling (RMS)

Rate Monotonic Scheduling assigns priority by period length and provides provable schedulability guarantees for periodic real-time tasks.