Operating Systems Questions

Absolute path-- Exact path from root directory.

Relative path-- Relative to the current path.

User thread

Kernel thread

When a process enters the system it is placed in the job queue.

We encounter cycle stealing in the context of Direct Memory Access (DMA). Either the DMA controller can use the data bus when the CPU does not need it, or it may force the CPU to temporarily suspend operation. The latter technique is called cycle stealing. Note that cycle stealing can be done only at specific break points in an instruction cycle.

Virtual memory is hardware technique where the system appears to have more memory that it actually does. This is done by time-sharing, the physical memory and storage parts of the memory one disk when they are not actively being used.

A list of processes waiting for a particular I/O device is called device queue.

SCSI - Small computer systems interface is a type of interface used for computer components such as hard drives, optical drives, scanners and tape drives. It is a competing technology to standard IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics).

To achieve maximum efficiency and reliability a mode of operation known as symmetric multiprocessing is used. In essence, with SMP any process or threads can be assigned to any processor.