Tutorial Week 12

Questions

Q1: What do the terms I/O bound and CPU bound mean when used to describe a process (or thread)?

Q2: What is the difference between cooperative and pre-emptive multitasking?

Q3: Consider the multilevel feedback queue scheduling algorithm used in traditional Unix systems. It is designed to favour IO bound over CPU bound processes. How is this achieved? How does it make sure that low priority, CPU bound background jobs do not suffer starvation?

Q4: Why would a hypothetical OS always schedule a thread in the same address space over a thread in a different address space? Is this a good idea?

Q5: Why would a round robin scheduler NOT use a very short time slice to provide good responsive application behaviour?

Q6: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a global scheduling queue over per-CPU queues? Under which circumstances would you use the one or the other? What features of a system would influence this decision?

Q7: When does spinning on a lock (busy waiting, as opposed to blocking on the lock, and being woken up when it's free) make sense in a multiprocessor environment?

Q8: Consider 3 periodic tasks with execution profiles shown below. Draw scheduling diagram for a rate monotonic and a earliest deadline first schedule.