Chapter 10

10.9 None of the disk-scheduling disciplines, except FCFS, is truly fair (starvation
may occur).
a. Explain why this assertion is true.

- Requests are delivered fast as soon as they are being issued

c. Explain why fairness is an important goal in a time-sharing system.

- Fairness is essential mostly for response time

- It shortens response time

d. Give three or more examples of circumstances in which it is important

that the operating system be unfair in serving I/O requests.

- There are multiple examples such as prioritizing requests of processes

- Another thing is that if kernel supports real-time process priorities, then
those processes must be prioritized first rather than the others

10.14 Describe some advantages and disadvantages of using SSDs as a caching tier
and as a disk-drive replacement compared with using only magnetic disks.

- Since SSDs have no moving parts, they are faster than magnetic disks

Chapter 11

11.9 Consider a file system in which a file can be deleted and its disk space
reclaimed while links to that file still exist. What problems may occur if a new file
is created in the same storage area or with the same absolute path name? How can
these problems be avoided?
 - An old file and a new file with the same storage area are still “linked” and
this problem can be avoided by deleting all the files “linked” to the deleted
file
- If the link is not deleted, you can remove them when the user is about to
access a deleted file so that the problem can be avoided

11.11 What are the advantages and disadvantages of providing mandatory locks
instead of advisory locks whose use is left to users’ discretion?

- Mutual Exclusion prevents simultaneous access to a shared resource

- It can be triggered with the use of memory locks
- Mandatory locks can limit the user’s access to files
11.14 If the operating system knew that a certain application was going to access
file data in a sequential manner, how could it exploit this information to improve
performance?

- Accessing a block triggers the system to transfer the data in the temporary
storage for later use
- This will reduce the time in waiting for upcoming requests