Operating Systems Today: From the Laptop to the Edge–Cloud

Which statement describes the system view of an operating system?

A programmer writes open("notes.txt") without knowing which disk sectors hold the file. This illustrates the OS as…

What problem did multiprogramming solve?

What was the main contribution of time-sharing systems such as CTSS and UNIX?

Processes wait for I/O 80% of the time (p = 0.8). With 4 processes in memory, what is the approximate CPU utilization (1 − pⁿ)?

With p = 0.8, what is the smallest number of processes that gives at least 90% CPU utilization according to 1 − pⁿ?

If processes wait for I/O only 50% of the time (p = 0.5), how many processes give at least 90% utilization?

Which statement correctly distinguishes multiprocessing from multitasking?

A car's anti-lock braking controller must react within 5 ms every time; missing the deadline once could cause an accident. Which OS type fits?

Users of a network OS know which machine holds a file; users of a distributed OS see many machines as one system. This property of a distributed OS is called…

Which pair of OS goals most directly conflict?

Which part of the OS runs with full hardware privileges?

90% of a program can run in parallel (P = 0.9). By Amdahl's law, what is the speedup on 8 cores?

For the same program (P = 0.9), what is the maximum speedup with unlimited processors?

With P = 0.9 and 16 cores, the speedup is 6.4. What is the parallel efficiency?

Which layer of the device–edge–cloud continuum typically offers 1–10 ms latency to a student's phone on campus?

Why would CampusAR send a video frame to an edge server instead of processing it on the phone?

Which technology first made it common to rent virtual machines by the hour (the start of the public cloud)?

Kubernetes decides on which machine each container runs and restarts failed ones. In OS terms, it behaves most like…

Which OS type is the best description of Android?

In the 1 − pⁿ utilization model, what assumption makes it only an approximation?

In a batch system of the 1950s–60s, what did the resident monitor do?

Which component is responsible for deciding which ready process gets the CPU next?

Why is energy efficiency now an OS goal both on phones and in data centres?

A faculty workflow has 200 tasks with dependencies. Adding more cloud servers barely speeds it up. Which explanation is most consistent with Amdahl's law?

Explain the two views of an operating system (user view and system view), with one example of each from EdgeCampus.

Processes in an EdgeCampus video-analytics server wait for network/disk I/O 60% of the time. Using 1 − pⁿ, compute CPU utilization for n = 1, 2 and 5, and the smallest n that gives at least 95%.

A research program is 95% parallelizable. Compute the Amdahl speedup and efficiency on 4, 16 and 64 cores, and the maximum speedup. What do you conclude for buying cloud servers?

Trace one CampusAR request (a student points the phone at a building to see its name and today's events) through the device, edge and cloud. For each layer, name one resource-management decision an OS or platform must make.

Give one problem that each of these steps in OS history solved: batch systems, multiprogramming, time-sharing, cloud computing, edge computing.