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 7 of 137 questions
131. What is starvation and aging?
Starvation: Starvation is a resource management problem where a process does not get the resources it needs for a long time because the resources are being allocated to other processes.
Aging: Aging is a technique to avoid starvation in a scheduling system. It works by adding an aging factor to the priority of each request. The aging factor must increase the requests priority as time passes and must ensure that a request will eventually be the highest priority request (after it has waited long
132. Give a non-computer example of preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling?
Consider any system where people use some kind of resources and compete for them. The non-computer examples for preemptive scheduling the traffic on the single lane road if there is emergency or there is an ambulance on the road the other vehicles give path to the vehicles that are in need. The example for preemptive scheduling is people standing in queue for tickets.
133. What is multi tasking, multi programming, multi threading?
Multi programming: Multiprogramming is the technique of running several programs at a time using timesharing.It allows a computer to do several things at the same time. Multiprogramming creates logical parallelism.
The concept of multiprogramming is that the operating system keeps several jobs in memory simultaneously. The operating system selects a job from the job pool and starts executing a job, when that job needs to wait for any i/o operations the CPU is switched to another job. So the mai
134. What do you mean by deadlock?
Ans : Deadlock is a situation where a group of processes are all blocked and none of them can become unblocked until one of the other becomes unblocked.The simplest deadlock is two processes each of which is waiting for a message from the other
135. What is Dispatcher?
->Dispatcher module gives control of the CPU to the process selected by the short-term scheduler; this involves:
Switching context
Switching to user mode
Jumping to the proper location in the user program to restart that program
Dispatch latency t
136. What is Throughput, Turnaround time, waiting time and Response time?
Throughput number of processes that complete their execution per time unit
Turnaround time amount of time to execute a particular process
Waiting time amount of time a process has been waiting in the ready queue
Response time amount of time it takes from when a request was submitted until the first response is produced, not output (for time-sharing environment)
137. Distributed Systems?
Distribute the computation among several physical processors.
Loosely coupled system each processor has its own local memory; processors communicate with one another through various communications lines, such as high-speed buses or telephone lines
Advantages of distributed systems:
->Resources Sharing
->Computation speed up load sharing
->Reliability
->Communications