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Top 53 Operating Systems Interview Questions & Answers (2026)
53 Questions
31 Beginner
13 Intermediate
9 Advanced
About Operating Systems
This technology is widely used in software development and is a frequent topic in technical interviews at companies of all sizes.
What to Expect in a Operating Systems Interview
Interviews cover both foundational concepts and practical application of this technology, with questions ranging from definitions to architectural decision-making.
How to Use This Guide
Work through questions in order of difficulty to build your understanding progressively. Bookmark challenging questions and revisit them before your interview.
Curated by Tech Baithak Editorial Team · Last updated: May 2026
Beginner
31 questions
Core concepts every Operating Systems developer must know.
01
What is an operating system?
02
What is a process?
03
What is a thread?
04
What is a process control block (PCB)?
05
What is CPU scheduling?
06
What is FCFS scheduling?
07
What is Round Robin scheduling?
08
What is Shortest Job First (SJF) scheduling?
09
What is a context switch?
10
What is an interrupt?
11
What is virtual memory?
12
What is paging?
13
What is a page fault?
14
What is swapping?
15
What is a file system?
16
What is deadlock?
17
What is mutual exclusion?
18
What is a semaphore?
19
What is a race condition?
20
What is the producer-consumer problem?
21
What is the readers-writers problem?
22
What is the dining philosophers problem?
23
What is memory fragmentation?
24
What is the difference between multiprogramming, multitasking, and multiprocessing?
25
What is process synchronization?
26
What is a monitor in operating systems?
27
What is inter-process communication (IPC)?
28
What is the difference between user mode and kernel mode?
29
What is a system call?
30
What is thrashing?
31
What is the difference between preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling?
Intermediate
13 questions
Practical knowledge for developers with hands-on experience.
01
What are page replacement algorithms?
02
What is the Banker's Algorithm?
03
What are disk scheduling algorithms?
04
What is a zombie process?
05
What is a daemon process?
06
What is memory segmentation?
07
What is copy-on-write (COW) in operating systems?
08
What are memory-mapped files?
09
What is the difference between hard links and soft links?
10
What is file system journaling?
11
What is the difference between concurrency and parallelism?
12
What is a spinlock?
13
What is priority inversion?
Advanced
9 questions
Deep expertise questions for senior and lead roles.
01
What is the Linux kernel scheduling (CFS)?
02
What is the difference between mutex, semaphore, and condition variable?
03
What is virtual memory in detail — TLB, page tables, huge pages?
04
What is the boot process of a Linux system?
05
What is NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access)?
06
What is cgroups (control groups) in Linux?
07
What are Linux namespaces and how do they enable containers?
08
What is I/O subsystem and device drivers?
09
What is real-time operating systems (RTOS)?
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53 questions total