Computer Awareness Quiz: Software and Operating Systems

The kernel is the central part of the operating system and is the portion that is loaded at boot time and stays resident in main memory for as long as the computer is running.

Firmware is software written permanently into a read only memory chip at the time of manufacture.

In Round Robin scheduling every ready process is given the processor for a fixed period called the time quantum, and when that period expires the process is moved to the back of the queue and the next one is served.

UNIX was developed in 1969 at Bell Laboratories by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, and it became the model for almost every multi user operating system that followed.

Deadlock is the state in which every process in a set is waiting for a resource that another process in the same set is holding, so none of them can ever move forward without the operating system stepping in.

The extended file system family, of which ext4 is the widely used member, was written for Linux and is the default arrangement for storing and naming files on a Linux disk.

A warm boot, also called a soft boot, is the restarting of a computer that is already running, usually through the restart option of the operating system or a reset key combination.

An interpreter reads one statement of the high level program, translates it into machine code and executes it immediately before moving to the next statement.

A real time system is judged not only by whether it gives the right answer but by whether it gives that answer inside a fixed deadline.

A word processor is written to do a job the user wants done, namely to create, edit, format and print a document, so it belongs to application software.

Spooling stands for simultaneous peripheral operations on line. The operating system writes the data meant for a slow device into a queue on the disk and lets the processor go on with other work, while the device picks jobs out of that queue at its own pace.