Technical Questions

It is a useful, memory-saving technique for multiprogrammed timesharing systems. A Reentrant Procedure is one in which multiple users can share a single copy of a program during the same period. Reentrancy has 2 key aspects: The program code cannot modify itself, and the local data for each user process must be stored separately. Thus, the permanent part is the code, and the temporary part is the pointer back to the calling program and local variables used by that program. Each execution instance is called activation. It executes the code in the permanent part, but has its own copy of local variables/parameters. The temporary part associated with each activation is the activation record. Generally, the activation record is kept on the stack.

Note: A reentrant procedure can be interrupted and called by an interrupting program, and still execute correctly on returning to the procedure.

When a program forks and the child finishes before the parent, the kernel still keeps some of its information about the child in case the parent might need it – for example, the parent may need to check the child’s exit status. To be able to get this information, the parent calls `wait()’; In the interval between the child terminating and the parent calling `wait()’, the child is said to be a `zombie’ (If you do `ps’, the child will have a `Z’ in its status field to indicate this.)

Preemptive scheduling: The preemptive scheduling is prioritized. The highest priority process should always be the process that is currently utilized.

Non-Preemptive scheduling: When a process enters the state of running, the state of that process is not deleted from the scheduler until it finishes its service time.

MAU is Multistation Access Unit

Every line has an upper limit and a lower limit on the frequency of signals it can carry. This limited range is called the bandwidth

High level data models provide the concepts that are close to the way many users perceive data

Daemon is a program that runs in the background without user’s interaction. A daemon runs in a multitasking operating system like UNIX. A daemon is initiated and controlled by special programs known as ‘processes’.