The purpose of this assignment is to review the basic types, structure and purpose of Operating Systems. Please respond to each question in your own words.

Q-1: In your own words describe the purpose and operation of the kernel in an operating system. How does it differ from a system and user applications?

The purpose of a kernel is to manage memory, I/O and storage resources, security and access the hardware resources in support of requests by user and system applications.

Q-2: What is the role of the kernel/user mode for program execution? How does the hardware need to be modified to support this?

Q-3: Name each of the various types of computing environments. Provide a one sentence description of each the computing environments listed. There should be a description for each environment listed.

Q-4: What is a Process Control Block? What role does it serve in the Scheduler?

Q-5: What are the two categories of interprocess communication? Describe each briefly.

Q-6: How does a thread differ from a process? What are the benefits of using threads over processes?

Q-7: Calculate the speedup using Amdahls law if a process, due to data dependency, runs serially for 20% but can be parallelized by 80% running on N=4 cores?