Homework 1

Important Dates

• Posted : January 25, 2008
• Due: 11:59 pm EST, February 1, 2008

Deliverable

• Answers in bullet form (not wordy sentences).
  Explain with figures wherever appropriate. A picture is worth a thousand words!
• PDF format (Text or MS-Word is fine)
• Email your answers to TA (Junsuk) with subject [cs6210] homework1 Name

Questions (7 questions)

1. Consider a processor that supports virtual memory. It has a virtually indexed physically tagged cache, TLB, and page table in memory. Explain what happens in such a processor from the time the CPU generates a virtual address to the point where the referenced memory contents are available to the processor.
2. Distinguish between segmentation and paging.
3. Explain all the actions from the time a process incurs a page fault to the time it resumes execution. Assume that this is the only runnable process in the entire system.
4. Explain the following terms: working set of a process, thrashing, paging daemon, swapper, loader, and linker.
5. Explain page coloring and how it may be used in memory management by an operating system.
6. Explain clearly the costs associated with a process context switch.
7. Explain the functionality of the different layers found in the network protocol stack of an operating system such as Linux.