Operating Systems – Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)

1. 49. What is parallelism in operating systems?

   • A. The actual simultaneous execution of multiple tasks on multiple processors or cores
   • B. The simulated simultaneous execution of tasks on a single processor
   • C. The management of parallel devices
   • D. A parallel file system

2. 50. What is inter-process communication (IPC)?

   • A. Mechanisms that allow processes to communicate and synchronize their actions
   • B. Communication between different computers
   • C. Communication between the OS and hardware
   • D. Communication between threads within the same process

3. 51. Which of the following is an IPC mechanism?

   • A. Pipes
   • B. Semaphores
   • C. Message queues
   • D. Shared memory

4. 52. What is a pipe in IPC?

   • A. A unidirectional communication channel between related processes
   • B. A bidirectional communication channel between unrelated processes
   • C. A mechanism for sharing memory
   • D. A signaling mechanism

5. 53. What is shared memory in IPC?

   • A. A region of memory that can be accessed by multiple processes
   • B. A file that is shared between processes
   • C. A queue for messages
   • D. A synchronization primitive

6. 54. What is a semaphore?

   • A. A synchronization primitive used to control access to shared resources
   • B. A communication channel
   • C. A memory allocation technique
   • D. A scheduling algorithm

7. 55. What is a mutex?

   • A. A locking mechanism that allows only one thread or process to hold the lock at any given time
   • B. A signaling mechanism
   • C. A way to share memory
   • D. A scheduling policy

8. 56. What is a monitor?

   • A. A high-level synchronization construct that provides mutual exclusion and condition variables
   • B. A low-level synchronization primitive
   • C. A hardware device
   • D. A type of scheduler

9. 57. What is a condition variable?

   • A. A synchronization primitive that allows threads to wait for a certain condition to become true
   • B. A type of mutex
   • C. A communication channel
   • D. A memory segment

10. 58. What is a race condition?

    • A. A situation where the outcome of a program depends on the uncontrolled order of execution of multiple threads or processes
    • B. A deadlock situation
    • C. A memory overflow error
    • D. A compilation error

11. 59. What is a critical section?

    • A. A segment of code that accesses shared resources
    • B. A part of the kernel
    • C. A user interface element
    • D. A function that performs I/O

12. 60. What is the purpose of synchronization?

    • A. To ensure that multiple processes or threads can access shared resources without causing data inconsistency
    • B. To speed up the execution of processes
    • C. To prevent deadlocks
    • D. To manage memory efficiently