One Minute Evaluations for 27-29 October 2004

CS 438-505 - Operating Systems Concepts

• Topic: This week we talked about mutual exclusion, concurrency, and deadlock.

  Question: When will your answers to assignment 1 be posted?

  One minute response: Soon.

• Topic: We talked about semaphores and avoiding deadlock.

  Question: Why do you entertain ball buster questions?

• Topic: We learned about deadlock and we learned how a system can avoid deadlock.

• Topic: Resource management and deadlock.

  Question: That solution for assignment 1 going up anytime soon.

  One minute response: Yes.

• Topic: Learned about deadlock.

  Question: This is really boring topics. I mean device management.

• Question: There is no Begin Critical Function () End Critical Section () in Unix. Then how do we implement a semaphore.

  One minute response: You don't have to; unix provides them. However, if you want to make your own, you could use a user-space mutual-exclusion algorithm like Peterson's (you'd have to modify Peterson's algorithm becasue it's a two-thread algorithm).

• Topic: Deadlock, avoidance/detection, cycle detection, using graphs to map resource usage, banker's algorithm.

• Topic: We have learned about deadlock and sharing between processes.

  Question: Is Windows structurally a bad OS? If so, why?

  One minute response: It is difficult to say, because Windows source is propriatery and I've never signed the forms to see it. However, the clues suggest that it is.

• Topic: We talked about how to deal with conflicting resource requests.

  Question: My question is: why won't my idle process run when all the other processes run just fine?

  One minute response: I'd have to look at your code to answer that.

• Topic: We have talked about the issues involving shared resources and [?] to fix and avoid.

  Question: Is it possible to mix some detection and recovery with some other methods to avoid deadlock?

  One minute response: Yes, but detection and recover tends to be a global mechanism, which might lead to duplication of effort when combined with other mechanisms.

• Topic: We learned about semaphores.

  Question: Can an OS deadlock by itself while idling?

  One minute response: No; it has to be at least performing some operation that can block.

This page last modified on 16 July 2003.