COMP 3000 Final Exam Study Guide 2012

Basic details

The final exam has 33 questions worth a total of 42 points, on four pages. 15 multiple choice questions, one yes/no, 12 true or false, four short answer, and one multi-part short answer. The test is only a page longer than the midterm and so it shouldn't take you much longer than it it. However, you will have 120 minutes to take it.

While many of the questions are based on questions from the midterm, most of these questions have been changed in some way. Read carefully and consider all options, particularly with the multiple choice questions. Simple pattern matching is a bad strategy!

Concepts

You should be familiar with the following concepts and how they interconnect:

Processes, threads (particularly in terms of execution contexts and address spaces)
What code is in the kernel and what isn't
Supervisor versus user mode
virtualization basics: what is a VM, what does machine look like inside a VM
Signals (SIGTERM, SIGKILL, SIGSTOP, SIGCONT, SIGCHLD, SIGSEGV, etc.)
signal handling: what can be handled, who calls them, how do they work?
Major system calls: fork, execve, open, close, read, write, lseek, mmap
The process hierarchy and zombie processes
Files, directories, inodes, sparse files
file permissions: users, groups, others, rwx, where are they stored?
Basic file-level concurrency, flock
Ubuntu/Debian alternatives system
Basic package management on Ubuntu: apt-get, dpkg
Basic package development: dpkg-dev, dpkg-buildpackage, fakeroot
filesystem administration: mkfs, fsck, mount, /etc/fstab
block versus character devices and how they are used
upstart and init
init and process hierarchy
upstart versus System V init scripts
upstart scripts, basic structure, purpose, common options
SysV init scripts, basic structure and purpose
device drivers
environment variables and command line arguments: how they are passed, how are they stored and accessed
static versus dynamic linking
basics of how dynamic linking is implemented (strace-level view)
strace and ltrace
Kernel: proc filesystem basics, structure of kernel, relation to C library
netcat: basic usage
PATH environment variable and the shell
basic command line I/O redirection: <, >>, >, |
shell commands: if, while, for, touch, test (with common tests), echo
built-in versus external shell commands (and relationship to processes)