General facts about Operating Systems
Modern Operating Systems by Tanenbaum is widely used;
one of its claims to fame is that Linux was developed from the Minix
OS developed in an earlier version of this book.
- What is a system call?
- How is a system call different from a library call?
- What is a device driver?
- What is livelock? What is deadlock? Give examples of each.
- What is a race? What can you do to prevent races?
- What is a mutex? What are semaphores? How are they implemented?
- Give examples of system calls that are not related to input-output.
- Give examples of library functions that call a system function all the time, none of the time, and some of the time.
- What is the time lag between the system call on the client side and the receipt of the packet on the server on a LAN?
- How fast can you write a gigabyte of data from RAM to disk?
- How does TCP/IP work?
- What is DNS?