CS 2200 - Fall Semester 1999

Part I - Conceptual Quesions (Closed book and notes)

1. To decouple a stage from its succeeding and preceding stages to enable autonomous execution of each stage.
2. No solution provided.
3. The successive return PC addresses are stashed away in a stack (usually mapped to some portion of the memory) so that successive "return from interrupt" instructions will bring it back to the original program that got interrupted with the first interrupt.
4. No solution provided.
5. No solution provided.
6. Thrashing is a phenomenon wherein there is excessive paging activity due to the memory not holding the working sets of the processes that are being currently scheduled by the short-term scheduler.
7. Yes it can so long as it is for the data accesses of the handler (such as the PT of the process that page-faulted in the first place).
8. No solution provided.
9. No solution provided.
10. Not necessarily. With a write-buffer the processor does not have to wait for the data to be written to memory to continue with the pipelined operation. However, if the write-buffer fills up then it has to stall upon the next write until there is space in the write-buffer.

Part II - Problem-oriented Quesions (Open book and notes)

1. See /tnt3/19/rama/problem-sets/ps1-sol.html on acme for solutions to selected problems from problem-set I,
   or follow the link Solutions to selected problems from Problem Set 1 .

2. See /tnt3/19/rama/problem-sets/ps2-sol.html on acme for solutions to selected problems from problem-set II,
   or follow the link Solutions to selected problems from Problem Set 2 .