Operating Systems MCQ
Test your Operating Systems knowledge with 100 multiple choice questions covering fundamentals to advanced concepts, with instant feedback and explanations.
What is an operating system?
2What is a process?
3What is a thread?
4What is virtual memory?
5What is a system call?
6What is context switching?
7What does CPU scheduling decide?
8What is deadlock?
9What is a semaphore?
10What is paging in memory management?
11What is the difference between preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling?
12What is the role of the Process Control Block (PCB)?
13What is a page fault?
14What is a file system?
15What is the difference between internal and external fragmentation?
16What is the FCFS (First Come First Serve) scheduling algorithm?
17What is the Round Robin scheduling algorithm?
18What is the difference between multiprogramming and multitasking?
19What is a mutex?
20What is thrashing in operating systems?
21What does fork() do in Unix/Linux?
22What is the Producer-Consumer problem?
23What is segmentation in memory management?
24What is the difference between kernel mode and user mode?
25What is the Least Recently Used (LRU) page replacement policy?
26What is an inode in Unix file systems?
27What is swapping in memory management?
28What is the banker's algorithm used for?
29What is an interrupt?
30What is DMA (Direct Memory Access)?
31What is a race condition?
32What is the critical section problem?
33What is the purpose of the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer)?
34What is a zombie process?
35What is a monolithic kernel vs a microkernel?
36What is the Shortest Job First (SJF) scheduling algorithm?
37What is inter-process communication (IPC)?
38What is the purpose of the boot loader?
39What is copy-on-write (COW) in operating systems?
40What does it mean for a process to be in the "ready" state?
What are the four Coffman conditions for deadlock?
2What is the difference between a binary semaphore and a counting semaphore?
3What is the working set model for virtual memory?
4What is the difference between hard links and symbolic links?
5What is Peterson's solution and what problem does it solve?
6What is demand paging?
7What is the clock (second-chance) page replacement algorithm?
8What is priority inversion?
9What is the multi-level feedback queue (MLFQ) scheduler?
10What is the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) in Linux?
11What is the difference between eager and lazy loading in virtual memory?
12What is a page table walk and what is the multi-level page table?
13What is the difference between user-level and kernel-level threads?
14What is the POSIX specification?
15What is the reader-writer problem?
16What is the difference between a process scheduler and a memory scheduler?
17What is the journaling file system?
18What is the dining philosophers problem?
19What is Belady's anomaly?
20What is the difference between preemptive and cooperative multitasking?
21What is the difference between a spinlock and a mutex?
22What is a virtual file system (VFS)?
23What is the purpose of the init process (PID 1)?
24What is CPU affinity and how does it relate to NUMA-aware scheduling?
25How does the Shortest Remaining Time First (SRTF) algorithm differ from non-preemptive SJF?
26Why can strict "shortest job first" scheduling lead to starvation?
27What problem does the "aging" technique solve in priority scheduling?
28In the producer-consumer (bounded-buffer) problem, why are two counting semaphores ("empty" and "full") needed in addition to a mutex?
29What is a monitor in the context of process synchronization?
30Why is the "circular wait" condition often the easiest of the four deadlock conditions to break in practice?
31What distinguishes deadlock detection from deadlock avoidance?
32How does segmentation with paging (segmented paging) combine the benefits of both schemes?
33What is the main tradeoff when choosing a smaller versus larger time quantum in Round Robin scheduling?
34Why do modern operating systems generally prefer demand paging over loading an entire process into memory at start-up?
35What is the purpose of a "dirty bit" associated with a page table entry?
36In a journaling file system, what is the difference between "metadata-only" journaling and "full data" journaling?
37How do message queues differ from shared memory as an inter-process communication mechanism?
38What is the role of the "scheduler" component in a microkernel-based operating system compared to a monolithic one?
39Why might an operating system use a "lazy" TLB invalidation strategy (such as address-space tagging with ASIDs) instead of flushing the entire TLB on every context switch?
40What is "priority donation" (or priority inheritance) and what problem does it directly address?
What is the difference between hardware and software TLB management?
2What is kernel-bypass networking (e.g., DPDK)?
3What is the seL4 microkernel and its significance?
4What is memory-mapped I/O vs port-mapped I/O?
5What is the exokernel architecture?
6What is NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) and its OS implications?
7What is huge pages and when are they beneficial?
8What is the completely fair queuing (CFQ) vs deadline I/O scheduler?
9What is control group (cgroup) in Linux?
10What is an eBPF program and how does it work in the Linux kernel?
11What is the difference between type-1 and type-2 hypervisors?
12What is the difference between hardware virtualization (VT-x) and software emulation?
13What is the slab allocator in the Linux kernel?
14What is Linux's OOM killer?
15What is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous I/O?
16What is io_uring and why is it significant?
17What is kernel preemption and when is it disabled?
18What is the difference between hard and soft real-time systems?
19What is the Rate-Monotonic Scheduling (RMS) algorithm?
20What is the W^X (write XOR execute) memory protection policy?