Assignment # 3

pg. 104

question # 4

a. What is the cause of thrashing?

- In virtual memory systems, thrashing may be caused by programs or workloads that present insufficient locality of reference: if the working set of a program or a workload cannot be effectively held within physical memory, then constant data swapping, i.e., thrashing, may occur. The term was first used during the tape operating system days to describe the sound the tapes made when data was being rapidly written to and read from them.

b. How does the operating sytem detect thrashing?

- An operating system would have no idea that thrashing is happening. The OS would be responsible for making use of virtual memory to make up for the lack of physical RAM during a particular computing session, but would have no concept that this is causing issues with hardware.

c. Once thrashing is detected, what can the operating system do to eliminate it?

- Thrashing is caused by under allocation of the minimum number of pages required by a process, forcing it to continuously page fault. The system can detect thrashing by evaluating the level of CPU utilization as compared to the level of multiprogramming. It can be eliminated by reducing the level of multiprogramming.

pg. 56
question # 1-3

a. Multiprogramming. Why is it used?
- Multiprogramming is the technique of running several programs at a time using timesharing. It allows a computer to do several things at the same time. Multiprogramming creates logical parallelism. The concept of multiprogramming is that the operating system keeps several jobs in memory simultaneously. The operating system selects a job from the job pool and starts executing a job, when that job needs to wait for any i/o operations the CPU is switched to another job. So the main idea here is that the CPU is never idle.

b. Internal fragmentation. How does it occur?
-Internal fragmentation is the space wasted inside of allocated memory blocks because of restriction on the allowed sizes of allocated blocks. Allocated memory may be slightly larger than requested memory; this size difference is memory internal to a partition, but not being used.

c. External fragmentation. How does it occur?
-External Fragmentation happens when a dynamic memory allocation algorithm allocates some memory and a small piece is left over that cannot be effectively used. If too much external fragmentation occurs, the amount of usable memory is drastically reduced. Total memory space exists to satisfy a request, but it is not contiguous.

d. Compaction. Why is it needed?
-
e. Relocation. How often should it be performed?
-relocation is the process of replacing symbolic references or names of libraries with actual usable addresses in memory before running a program. It is typically done by the linker during compilation, although it can be done at run-time by a loader. Compilers or assemblers typically generate the executable with zero as the lower-most, starting address. Before the execution of object code, these addresses should be adjusted so that they denote the correct runtime addresses.

2. Describe the major disadvantages for each of the four memory allocation schemes presented in the chapter.
- The major disadvantage only 1 job per partition and waste of main storage.

3. Describe the major advantages for each of the memory allocation schemes presented in the chapter.
-The major advantage of this is operating system is easy to implement.

Assignment 2

Virtual memory is a computer system technique which gives an application program the impression that it has contiguous working memory, while in fact it is physically fragmented and may even overflow on to disk storage. Systems which use this technique make programming of large applications easier and use real physical memory more efficiently than those without virtual memory. The virtual-memory manager (VMM) in Windows NT is nothing like the memory managers used in previous versions of the Windows operating system. Relying on a 32-bit address model, Windows NT is able to drop the segmented architecture of previous versions of Windows. Instead, the VMM employs 32-bit virtual addresses for directly manipulating the entire 4-GB process. At first this appears to be a restriction because, without segment selectors for relative addressing, there is no way to move a chunk of memory without having to change the address that references it. In reality, the VMM is able to do exactly that by implementing virtual addresses. Each application is able to reference a physical chunk of memory, at a specific virtual address, throughout the life of the application. The VMM takes care of whether the memory should be moved to a new location or swapped to disk completely independently of the application, much like updating a selector entry in the local descriptor table (LDT).

Sources: (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810616.aspx)

Assignment No. 1

1.
An operating system (sometimes abbreviated as "OS") is the program that, after being initially loaded into the computer by a boot program, manages all the other programs in a computer. The other programs are called applications or application programs. The application programs make use of the operating system by making requests for services through a defined application program interface (API). In addition, users can interact directly with the operating system through a user interface such as a command language or a graphical user interface (GUI). In this article, the author makes the explanation brief and understandable to the reader.
The author also makes the article more presentable.
(http://searchsmb.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid44_gci212714,00.html)
2.
The two reasons why regional bank might decide to buy six server computers than one supercomputer:

• It's because six server computers can store more data and easy to manipulate and operated.
• because six server computers can perform faster than one supercomputer in terms of number of unit.