CS 574 Midterm Topics

The short form, of course is that the midterm will cover material from chapters 2-5 and 7-10 of the Bovet and Cesati book.

The long form is...

Chapter 2

Paged virtual memory, including three-level page tables. I'm more likely to ask conceptual questions about the functions described in the book than I am specific Intel VM questions (so no virtual-physical translations).

Chapter 3

Processes, especially the data structures and system calls used in process management, creation, and deletion.

Chapter 4

Have a good sense of what the hardware and the OS do in processing interrupts and exceptions.

Chapter 5

You can definitely expect quite a bit from this chapter. Make sure you understand the various syncronization primitives.

Chapter 7

Another really important one. Know about the various allocatores, know about slab coloring, etc.

Chapter 8

Know about the process address space, regions, etc. No, I won't be asking any red-black tree questions.

Chapter 9

Light coverage on this one.

Chapter 10

Understand the data structures for signal handling.