SECTION A — What This Section Covers
Section A contains 10 short 2-mark questions that check a student’s fundamental understanding of the core operating system concepts.
This part covers:
basic OS functions, advantages of multiprogramming, busy waiting, semaphores and their types, starvation and its solution, memory fragmentation, thrashing with locality of reference, physical vs. logical address, file operations, and tree-structured directories.
This section tests quick recall of definitions, differences, short explanations, and fundamental OS terminologies.
SECTION B — What This Section Covers
Section B contains any three 10-mark descriptive and numerical questions.
This section includes:
detailed explanation of multiprocessor, real-time, and time-sharing systems;
priority scheduling with Gantt charts and average waiting/turnaround time;
Banker’s Algorithm (need matrix, safety check, resource request handling);
process & PCB with process state transition diagram;
and paging with TLB hardware support.
This section evaluates the student’s understanding of CPU scheduling, deadlock avoidance, process management, and memory management mechanisms in detail with diagrams and calculations.
SECTION C — What This Section Covers
Section C contains long, in-depth 10-mark questions, one part to be attempted from each pair.
The topics include:
RAID, RAID levels and characteristics;
file system management with allocation/access methods;
producer–consumer problem using semaphores;
dining philosopher problem using semaphores;
demand paging with FIFO/LRU/OPT page-fault computation;
hit ratio vs. miss ratio with effective access time calculation;
multilevel feedback queue scheduling;
fixed vs. variable partitioning;
disk scheduling (SSTF/SCAN/CSCAN/LOOK) with total head movement;
deadlocks, conditions, and resource-allocation graph;
buffering, polling and DMA.
This section tests advanced understanding of concurrency control, synchronization, virtual memory, disk scheduling, file systems, deadlocks and system performance techniques.
