Operating System Interview Questions & Answers
Showing 10 of 137 questions | Page 10
Operating system technical interview questions and answers help students and job seekers understand core computing concepts that are essential for technical interviews. The operating system acts as a bridge between hardware and software, making it one of the fundamental subjects tested in campus placement interviews. Recruiters frequently ask questions about process management, memory allocation, deadlocks, scheduling algorithms, threads, file systems, and OS architecture. These OS interview questions appear repeatedly in companies like TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant, Capgemini, and Accenture. This guide explains the most commonly asked OS interview questions with easy-to-understand answers, practical examples, and simple definitions. Whether you are preparing for your first job, a technical round, or a written placement test, understanding OS concepts will help you perform confidently. You can also practice mock questions or download PDFs to strengthen your preparation.
Showing 10 of 137 questions
91. What is a semaphore?
It is a synchronization tool used to solve complex critical section problems. A semaphore is an integer variable that, apart from initialization, is accessed only through two standard atomic operations: Wait and Signal.
92. What is bounded-buffer problem?
Here we assume that a pool consists of n buffers, each capable of holding one item. The semaphore provides mutual exclusion for accesses to the buffer pool and is initialized to the value 1.The empty and full semaphores count the number of empty and full buffers, respectively. Empty is initialized to n, and full is initialized to 0.
93. What is readers-writers problem?
Here we divide the processes into two types:
1. Readers (Who want to retrieve the data only)
2. Writers (Who want to retrieve as well as manipulate)
We can provide permission to a number of readers to read same data at same time.But a writer must be exclusively allowed to access. There are two solutions to this problem:
1. No reader will be kept waiting unless a writer has already obtained permission to use the shared object. In other words, no reader should wait for other readers to complet
94. What is dining philosophers problem?
Ans: Consider 5 philosophers who spend their lives thinking and eating. The philosophers share a common circular table surrounded by 5 chairs, each belonging to one philosopher. In the center of the table is a bowl of rice, and the table is laid with five single chop sticks. When a philosopher thinks, she doesnt interact with her colleagues.
From time to time, a philosopher gets hungry and tries to pick up two chop sticks that are closest to her .A philosopher may pick up only one chop stick
95. What is a deadlock?
Suppose a process request resources; if the resources are not available at that time the process enters into a wait state. A waiting process may never again change state, because the resources they have requested are held by some other waiting processes. This situation is called deadlock.
96. What are necessary conditions for dead lock?
1. Mutual exclusion (where at least one resource is non-sharable)
2. Hold and wait (where a process hold one resource and waits for other resource)
3. No preemption (where the resources cant be preempted)
4. circular wait (where p[i] is waiting for p[j] to release a resource. i= 1,2,…n
j=if (i!=n) then i+1
else 1 )
97. What is resource allocation graph?
This is the graphical description of deadlocks. This graph consists of a set of edges E and a set of vertices V. The set of vertices V is partitioned into two different types of nodes P={p1,p2,…,pn}, the set consisting of all the resources in the system, R={r1,r2,…rn}.A directed edge Pi?Rj is called a request edge; a directed edge Rj?
Pi is called an assignment edge. Pictorially we represent a process Pi as a circle, and each resource type Rj as square.Since resource type Rj may have more than
98. What are deadlock prevention techniques?
1. Mutual exclusion : Some resources such as read only files shouldnt be mutually
exclusive. They should be sharable. But some resources such as printers must be
mutually exclusive.
2. Hold and wait : To avoid this condition we have to ensure that if a process is
requesting for a resource it should not hold any resources.
3. No preemption : If a process is holding some resources and requests another
resource that cannot be immediately allocated to it (that is the process must wait),
then
99. What is a safe state and a safe sequence?
A system is in safe state only if there exists a safe sequence. A sequence of processes is a safe sequence for the current allocation state if, for each Pi, the resources that the Pi can still request can be satisfied by the currently available resources plus the resources held by all the Pj, with j
100. What are the deadlock avoidance algorithms?
A dead lock avoidance algorithm dynamically examines the resource-allocation state to ensure that a circular wait condition can never exist. The resource allocation state is defined by the number of available and allocated resources, and the maximum demand of the process.There are two algorithms:
1. Resource allocation graph algorithm
2. Bankers algorithm
a. Safety algorithm
b. Resource request algorithm