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.
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31. What is SMP?
To achieve maximum efficiency and reliability a mode of operation known as symmetric multiprocessing is used. In essence, with SMP any process or threads can be assigned to any processor.
32. What are the key object oriented concepts used by Windows NT?
Ø Encapsulation
Ø Object class and instance
33. Is Windows NT a full blown object oriented operating system? Give reasons.
No Windows NT is not so, because its not implemented in object oriented language and the data structures reside within one executive component and are not represented as objects and it does not support object oriented capabilities .
34. What is a drawback of MVT?
It does not have the features like
Ø ability to support multiple processors
Ø virtual storage
Ø source level debugging
35. What is process spawning?
When the OS at the explicit request of another process creates a process, this action is called process spawning.
36. How many jobs can be run concurrently on MVT?
15 jobs
37. List out some reasons for process termination.
Ø Normal completion
Ø Time limit exceeded
Ø Memory unavailable
Ø Bounds violation
Ø Protection error
Ø Arithmetic error
Ø Time overrun
Ø I/O failure
Ø Invalid instruction
Ø Privileged instruction
Ø Data misuse
Ø Operator or OS intervention
Ø Parent termination.
38. What are the reasons for process suspension?
Ø swapping
Ø interactive user request
Ø timing
Ø parent process request
39. What is process migration?
It is the transfer of sufficient amount of the state of process from one machine to the target machine
40. What is mutant?
In Windows NT a mutant provides kernel mode or user mode mutual exclusion with the notion of ownership.