Principles of Operating Systems

CMSC 421 - Spring 2019

Homework 2

50 points total

Due by 11:59PM EDT on Wednesday, March 13th

Please provide written responses to the following questions. Each response should be about a paragraph or two in length — there is no need to write us a book for each, just be sure to answer the question thoroughly. Each question is worth 10 points.

  1. Explain the concept of Interprocess Communication (IPC). Compare and contrast the two main methods of IPC: shared memory and message passing. What is the role of sockets in IPC and what type of IPC mechanism (of the two above) do they represent?
  2. Explain the concept of system calls and how they work in an OS. Give a concrete example of a task that requires multiple system calls to be called to complete in a modern computer system and identify which system calls would need to be called (potential tasks you could use include things like copying a file or reading a web page from a remote server).
  3. Describe what a context switch is. Be sure to include different reasons that a context switch may occur in a system and what data within the system needs to be swapped out during the context switch. How does the data swapped out differ when switching between two threads within a single process and between two separate processes.
  4. Describe parallelism and concurrency. Be sure to clearly define the difference between these two concepts.
  5. Briefly explain what a mutex lock and a counting semaphore are. Describe at least one situation where each of these synchronization primitives could be used with multiple threads in a process.

You must submit a PDF file of the answers to these questions on the Homework 2 assignment on Blackboard. You may prepare your responses in any word processing application of your choosing, but you must submit a PDF file. Do not submit Microsoft Word/Apple Pages/LibreOffice documents with your responses. You must convert to a PDF file before submitting or you will lose points.

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