Definitions (from textbook)

Question 1

absolute path

Answer 1

A file path name interpreted relative to the root directory.

Question 2

abstract virtual machine

Answer 2

The interface provided by an operating system to its applications, including the system
call interface, the memory abstraction, exceptions, and signals.

Question 3

ACID properties

Answer 3

A mnemonic for the properties of a transaction: atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.

Question 4

acquire-all/release-all

Answer 4

A design pattern to provide atomicity of a request consisting of multiple operations. A thread acquires all of the locks it might need before starting to process a request; it releases the locks once the request is done.

Question 5

address translation

Answer 5

The conversion from the memory address the program thinks it is referencing to the physical location of the memory

Question 6

affinity scheduling

Answer 6

A scheduling policy where tasks are preferentially scheduled onto the same processor
they had previously been assigned, to improve cache reuse.

Question 7

annual disk failure rate

Answer 7

The fraction of disks expected to failure each year.

Question 8

application programming interface

Answer 8

The system call interface provided by an operating system to applications.

Question 9

Arm

Answer 9

An attachment allowing the motion of the disk head across a disk surface.

Question 10

arm assembly

Answer 10

A motor plus the set of disk arms needed to position a disk head to read or write each surface of the disk.

Question 11

arrival rate

Answer 11

The rate at which tasks arrive for service.

Question 12

asynchronous I/O

Answer 12

A design pattern for system calls to allow a single-threaded process to make multiple concurrent I/O requests. When the process issues an I/O request, the system call returns immediately. The process later on receives a notification when the I/O completes.

Question 13

asynchronous procedure call

Answer 13

A procedure call where the caller starts the function, continues execution concurrently
with the called function, and later waits for the function to complete.

Question 14

atomic commit

Answer 14

The moment when a transaction commits to apply all of its updates

Question 15

atomic memory

Answer 15

The value stored in memory is the last value stored by one of the processors, not a mixture of the updates of different processors.