Advanced Operating Systems Interview Questions - Process Scheduling, Deadlocks, Memory Management, and More

1. What is a deadlock?
2. How do you prevent a deadlock?
3. What is synchronization?
4. What is a semaphore?
5. What is a race condition?
6. What are mutex locks?
7. What is a process?
8. Difference between thread and process?
9. What is an orphan process?
10. Why is the CPU known as a resource allocator?
11. What is the role of the kernel in an OS?
12. What is the difference between paging and segmentation?
13. What is thrashing?
14. What is virtual memory?
15. What is aging?
16. What is context switching?
17. Explain process synchronization?
18. Mention any four scheduling algorithms and which is the best scheduling algorithm?
19. What is spooling?
20. What is the use of the trap bit?
21. What is a bootstrap program?
22. Can a system run without an OS?
23. What sockets do hackers use?
24. What are the types of semaphores?
25. What is compaction?
26. How can you increase the priority of a process?
27. What is disk scheduling?
28. What is Belady's anomaly?
29. What is C-SCAN?
30. What is interprocess communication?
31. What are real-time systems?
32. What is timestamp?
33. What are the different cache mapping techniques?
34. What is response and turnaround time?
35. What are the different file accessing methods?
36. What is memory management, and how is the OS responsible for it?
37. Mention any two deadlock prevention algorithms.
38. What is system software?
39. What is a critical section in the context of process synchronization?
40. What is a deadlock avoidance algorithm, and how does it work?
41. What is the difference between preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling?
42. Explain the concept of paging in virtual memory.
43. What is the purpose of a file system, and how does it work?
44. What is a system call, and how is it different from a regular function call?
45. What is a thread pool, and how does it improve performance in multi-threaded applications?
46. Explain the concept of demand paging and how it improves the efficiency of virtual memory.
47. What is a cache hit and a cache miss, and how do they affect system performance?
48. What is the role of the memory manager in an operating system?
49. What is the purpose of the process scheduler in an operating system, and how does it work?
50. Explain the concept of a deadlock detection algorithm, and how is it used in practice?
51. What is the difference between a kernel thread and a user-level thread?
52. What is the difference between a semaphore and a mutex, and when would you use each one?
53. How does virtual memory protect processes from interfering with each other?
54. What is a context switch, and why is it an important operation in an operating system?
55. How do you measure the performance of an operating system, and what metrics are used?
56. What is a device driver, and what is its role in an operating system?
57. How does the operating system manage input/output operations, and what challenges does it face?
58. What is a trap, and how is it used in operating system design?