OBJECTIVES
Understand the basics of a computer architecture.
• Identify communications approaches between CPU, memory, and other peripheral devices.
• Understand how computers execute programs.
ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS
Answer the following questions the best you can. Cite the literature that you used to find the answer to the question (if it is necessary).
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List four activities of a typical operating system.
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Summarize the distinction between batch processing and interactive processing.
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Suppose three items, R, S, and T, are placed in a queue in that order. Then one item is removed from the queue before a fourth item, X, is placed in the queue. Then one item is removed from the queue, the items Y and Z are placed in the queue, and then the queue is emptied by removing one item at a time. List all the items in the order in which they were removed.
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Suppose a computer contained 512MB (MiB) of main memory, and an operating system needed to create a virtual memory of twice that size using pages of 2KB (KiB). How many pages would be required?
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A process is said to be I/O-bound if it requires a lot of I/O operations, whereas a process that consists of mostly computations within the CPU/memory system is said to be compute-bound. If both a compute-bound process and an I/O-bound process are waiting for a time slice, which should be given priority? Why?
6. Identify three ways in which a process could challenge the security of a computer system if not prevented from doing so by the operating system.
7. Suppose a password consisted of a string of nine characters from the English alphabet (twenty-six characters). If each possible password could be tested in a millisecond, how long would it take to test all possible passwords?