Tutorial Week 11

Questions

Q1: Suppose that a disk drive has 5000 cylinders, numbered 0 to 4999. The drive is currently serving a request at cylinder 143, and the previous request was at cylinder 125. The queue of pending requests, in FIFO order, is
86, 1470, 913, 1774, 948, 1509, 1022, 1750, 130.
Starting from the current head position, what is the total distance (in cylinders) that the disk arm moves to satisfy all the pending requests, for each of the following disk-scheduling algorithms?

1. FIFO
2. SSTF
3. SCAN (Elevator)
4. C-SCAN (Modified ELevator)

Q2: A disk has an average seek time of 5ms, a rotational speed of 15,000 rpm, and 500 sectors per track. What is the average access time to read a single sector? What is the expected time to read 500 contiguous sectors on the same track? What is the expected time to read 500 sectors scattered over the disk?

Q3: Describe programmed I/O and interrupt-driven I/O in the case of receiving input (e.g. from a serial port). Which technique normally leads to more efficient use of the CPU? Describe a scenario where the alternative technique is more efficient.

Q4: A device driver routine (e.g. read_block() from disk) is invoked by the file system code. The data for the filesystem is requested from the disk, but is not yet available. What do device drivers generally do in this scenario?

Q5: Describe how I/O buffering can be formulated as a bounded-buffer producer-consumer problem.

Q6: What is disk skew and interleaving? Why would a file system (or disk controller firmware) use these techniques?

Q7: An example operating system runs its interrupt handlers on the kernel stack of the currently running application. What restriction does this place on the interrupt handler code? Why is the restriction required?