Talk:COMP 3000 Final Exam Study Guide 2012

There's what I would put down. There may be mistakes...

Concepts

Processes, threads (particularly in terms of execution contexts and address spaces)

Processes are execution environments with a minimum of one running thread. They all have their own virtual memory address spaces. A process can have many threads.

What code is in the kernel and what isn't

The kernel boots before anything, so it can't rely on any userland libraries like the C std library. The kernel re-implements much functionality found in said library (printf vs printk).

Supervisor versus user mode

These are CPU modes. Supervisor allows unrestricted access to the system. Only kernel code (with a few exceptions).

User mode only grants access to the system via system calls.

See CPU Modes

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)