CS 2200 - Fall Semester 1999

This contains some sample questions for your midterm exam practice.

Part I - Conceptual Quesions (Closed book and notes)

1. In a pipelined processor implementation, why is there a buffer between any two stages of the pipeline?
2. What happens upon a device interrupt? Explain the sequence of actions from the point of view of a pipelined processor.
3. Explain what happens when there are cascaded interrupts. How does the processor handle that?
4. Distinguish between exceptions and interrupts.
5. Distinguish between internal and external fragmentation.
6. Explain thrashing as it applies to memory management in operating systems.
7. Can a page fault handler incur a page fault? Explain your answer.
8. What is a working-set? How is the principle of locality related to working sets?
9. Explain the pros and cons of write-through caches.
10. Can there be a performance disadvantage to using write-through caches in a pipelined processor? Explain your answer.

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

1. See Problem set 1 for questions relating to instructions-sets, processor implementation, and processor scheduling.

2. See Problem set 2 for questions relating to memory management, and memory hierarchies.