Winter 1999 Final Exam Solutions

Please note: these solutions are not an official solution set; they are based off of one of the TA's exam papers from when he was a student in the class, with answers clarified as needed.


PART 1: True/False

1) True: you can just increment the heap as you allocate. Fragmentation can only occur when you free things in the middle of allocated space.

2) True: By decreasing main memory to increase the buffer cache, you may cause processes to need to swap more often, which can decrease performance.

3) False: It's possible that at any given time, only a small subset of the files are in use; in this case, that subset can be entirely cached throughout its use.

4) False: Connection based networks are designed to deal well with such things. Connectionless networking would tend to be bursty, etc., which would have such behavior.


PART 2: Short answer

5) Suppose the page table is currently swapped out. Then, when a TLB fault occurs, epc and badva will be set, and the TLB handler will attempt to get the translation. This will result in another fault, which then overwrites epc and badva.

6) The Honor Code assumes that students want the policy enforced. It also assumes that students are competent to make judgements about what constitutes a policy violation. When these assumptions are valid, it can prevent an attack where a group of students try to collaborate to cheat.

7)
a)FCFS
b) Large packets can monopolize the link. You can put an upper limit on packet size to force "time slicing".

8)
a) 51 threads required, since each thread runs for 0.02 ms, blocks for 1 ms, during which time 50 other threads can run.
b) 41 threads: 0.025 ms/thread before it blocks.
c) A bad scheduler can swap at inappropriate times, ruining performance. Also, [not sure]...

9)
a) It works: initate_gc doesn't run when malloc is resetting the heap, and it's ok to run at any other time.
b) The program might have suffered from much external fragmentation, so compaction can put more things on the same page.

10)
a) 10 round trips/second => 4800 bytes/second => ~0.0046 MB/s
b) 100 packets = 48000 bytes; 100 packets sent = 10000 ms xfer time; 1 timeout = 1000 ms; 11 seconds total, 48000 bytes => ~0.0042 MB/s
c) 2 round trips = 300 ms; 960 bytes per .3 sec; ~ 0.0031 MB/s
d) Same as for c): send p1, wait 150 ms, resend, 50 ms later get ack, send p2 exactly 200 ms after p1 sent, which is exactly what happened before.

11)
a) Paging: fixed sized memory pages can waste space internally. Also, disk sectors: fixed sized disk amounts.
b) User can malloc exactly as much memory as desired, so that it doesn't have unused internal memory.
c) Giving out a class A address to Stanford, for example, is internal fragmentation, since class A addresses have millions of addresses but Stanford has fewer than millions of computers. This namespace is unusable to other people. IP addresses are allocated in different classes (A, B, C) to help minimize the wasted space.
d) Blocking on locked resources: when you do this, you're waiting and not using entire time slice, but nobody else can use it either. Schedulers fight this effect by switching waiting processes out.
e) Connection based networks must devote resources to connections even when unused (or idle/waiting), so others can't use these resources. Connectionless networks don't do this, so anyone can use all resources, but gives up quality assurance.
f) Just buy more memory: there's always going to be a big enough block of memory if we add enough fresh memory at the end.

12)
a) - Requires 2^32 bytes of actual data: 1048576 data blocks.
- 1024 block ptrs per indirect block.
- 1048564 blocks/1024 = 1024 indirect blocks needed.
- 1 double-indirect block needed.
- 256 bytes for inode.
- Total: 4299165952 bytes.
b) To read: 1 read required for the inode, 1 to read the double indirect block, 1 to read indirect, 1 to read the data: 4 disk accesses. To write: 4 reads, plus 1 write = 5 disk accesses.
c) Allysa is right: high-order bits denote subnet, so hosts on the same subnet have numerical values close to each other. So, bringing in a block to cache brings in 4096 bytes/hosts on the same subnet.

13)
a) A crash can point metadata at uninitialized blocks. We can use write ahead logging for recovery. [Full solution requires an explanation of write-ahead logging.]
b) He can be trying to write an entry that sits across 2 sectors, so that 4 bytes are written to one sector but the other 2 aren't written to the other sector (or vice versa).
c) You can store the ip and eth addresses on the NVRAM which together are 10 bytes. Then, after a system crash, you can force an update of the ip:eth pair to the file.


Last modified: Sat Mar 4 17:47:18 PST 2000