Homework 1

22C:116, Fall 1995

Due Friday Aug. 25, 1995, in class

Douglas W. Jones

This assignment is dominated by review questions that are not as much specific to the material in the book as they are to material you should have learned in prior courses or work experience.

  1. What is your E-mail address? (If you have more than one, give the address you'd prefer used for class purposes.)

  2. What is a process? Write a paragraph giving clear general definition of the term, as used in the context of operating systems. Try to avoid giving a definition that is specific to one particular system.

  3. What is a file? Write a paragraph giving a clear general definition, contrasting the concept of a file with the concepts of devices, on the one hand, and file descriptors (as the term is used in C) on the other. For those who prefer a Pascal centered world view, substitute the term file variable for file descriptor in the above.

  4. What is a device driver? Write a paragraph giving a clear general definition that avoids specific details of either specific devices or particularl operating systems.

  5. What is a privileged instruction. Write a paragraph giving a clear general definition that avoids specific details of any particular architecture. In this paragraph, you should describe what happens when user code tries to execute a privileged instruction and why certain instructions are privileged in many instruction sets.