Principles of Operating Systems

CMSC 421 - Spring 2020

Homework 4

50 points total

Due by 11:59 PM EDT on Tuesday, May 12th

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. Define what RAID stands for and describe how two different levels of RAID (other than RAID-0) provide for data reliability.
  2. Describe what an Inode is in a UNIX-like system. Which pieces of file metadata are stored in the inode of a filesystem such as ext2 and which pieces of metadata are stored in the directory entry?
  3. Describe in detail the following directory structures: tree-based, acyclic graph-based, and general graph-based. Be sure to note the differences between all of them.
  4. Describe how the ext2 filesystem stores metadata and free-space information to attempt to limit the amount of drive movement needed to access this data when reading/writing files.
  5. Describe how fail0verflow was able to obtain the binary code of the PS4 OS and begin exploit analysis on it.

You must submit a PDF file of the answers to these questions on the Homework 4 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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