Define Exception or Interrupt?

1 Answer

Answer :

An unscheduled event that disrupts program execution. The address of the instruction that
overflowed is saved in a register, and the computer jumps to a predefined address to invoke the
appropriate routine for that exception.

Related questions

Description : What is Interrupt?

Last Answer : An interrupt is an unscheduled event that disrupts program execution, used to detect overflow

Description : Differentiate Programmed I/O and Interrupt I/O?

Last Answer : Interrupt I/O is more efficient than Programmed I/O because it eliminates needless waiting However Interrupt I/O consumes a lot of processors time

Description : What is exception?

Last Answer : An exception is an unexpected event from within the processor; arithmetic overflow is an example of an exception. The basic action that the machine must perform when an exception occurs is to save ... program counter (EPC) and then transfer control to the operating system at some specified address.

Description : Define latency time?

Last Answer : This is the amount of time that elapses after the head is positioned over the correct track until the starting position of the addressed sector passes under the read/write head.

Description : Define Direct Memory Access?

Last Answer : A mechanism that provides a device controller with the ability to transfer data directly to or from the memory without involving the processor.

Description : Define Translation-Lookaside Buffer (TLB)?

Last Answer : Most commercial virtual memory systems incorporate a mechanism that can avoid the bulk of the main memory access called for by the virtual to physical addresses translation buffer. This may be done with a cache memory called a translation buffer, which retains the results of the recent translation.

Description : Define Segmentation?

Last Answer : A variable-size address mapping scheme in which an address consists of two parts: a segment number,which is mapped to a physical address, and a segment offset.

Description : Define Least Recently Used?

Last Answer : A replacement scheme in which the block replaced is the one that has been unused for the longest time.LRU replacement is implemented by keeping track of when each element in a set was used relative to the other elements in the set.

Description : Define Cache Miss?

Last Answer : A request for data from the cache that cannot be filled because the data is not present in the cache. The control unit must detect a miss and process the miss by fetching the requested data from memory.

Description : Define Hit ratio?

Last Answer : Hit ratio or Hit rate is the fraction of memory accesses found in the upper level memory hierarchy. Hit ratio is often used as a measure of the performance of the memory hierarchy.

Description : Define Memory hierarchy?

Last Answer : 1. Processor memory 2. Main memory 3. Secondary memory

Description : Define a process.

Last Answer : A process includes one or more threads, the address space and the operating system state. During a process switch operating system is invoked.

Description : Define a Thread.

Last Answer : A thread includes the program counter, the register state and stack. It is a lightweight process. The commonly share a single address space.

Description : Define a reservation station?

Last Answer : Define a reservation station?

Description : Define a super scalar processor?

Last Answer : It is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called Instruction level parallelism with a single processor.

Description : Define Forwarding?

Last Answer : Also called bypassing. A method of resolving a data hazard by retrieving the missing data element from internal buffers rather than waiting for it to arrive from programmer visible registers or memory.

Description : Define Branch Taken & Branch not taken?

Last Answer : A branch where the branch condition is satisfied and the program counter(PC) becomes the branch target. All unconditional branches are taken branches. A branch where the branch condition is false and the program counter(PC) becomes the address of the instruction that sequentially follows the branch.

Description : Define Branch Target Address?

Last Answer : The address specified in a branch, which becomes the new program counter(PC) if the branch is taken. In the MIPS architecture the branch target is given by the sum of the offset field of the instruction and the address of the instruction following the branch.

Description : Define Register File?

Last Answer : The processor's 32 general-purpose registers are stored in a structure called a register file. A register file is a collection of registers in which any register can be read or written by ... number of the register in the file. The register file contains the register state of the computer.

Description : Define memory access time?

Last Answer : The time that elapses between the initiation of an operation and completion of that operation, for example, the time between the READ and the MFC signals .This is Referred to as memory access time.

Description : Define pipelining.

Last Answer : Pipelining is a technique of decomposing a sequential process into sub operations with each sub process being executed in a special dedicated segment that operates concurrently with all other segments.

Description : Define Overflow & Underflow?

Last Answer : A situation in which a positive exponent becomes too large to fit in the exponent field. A situation in which a negative exponent becomes too large to fit in the exponent field.

Description : Define carry save addition (CSA) process.

Last Answer : Instead of letting the carries ripple along the rows, they can be saved and introduced into the next roe at the correct weighted position. Delay in CSA is less than delay through the ripple carry adder.

Description : Define Little Endian arrangements?

Last Answer : Little-endian describes the order in which a sequence of bytes is stored in computer memory. Little endian is an order in which the “little end” (least significant value in the sequence) is stored first.

Description : Define– Stored Program Concepts

Last Answer : Today's computers are built on two key principles: Instructions are represented as numbers. Programs are stored in memory to be read or written, just like data. These principles lead to ... the same way as data greatly simplifies both the memory hardware and the software of computer systems.

Description : Define Registers?

Last Answer : In computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available on the CPU whose contents can be accessed more quickly than storage available elsewhere. Modern computer architectures operate on ... of the memory hierarchy, and provide the fastest way for a CPU to access data.

Description : Define Addressing Modes?

Last Answer : The different ways in which the operands of an instruction are specified are called as addressing modes. The MIPS addressing modes are the following: 1. Immediate addressing 2. Register addressing 3. Base or displacement addressing 4. PC-relative addressing 5. Pseudo direct addressing

Description : Define different types of Data Transfer Instructions?

Last Answer : A command that moves data between memory and registers. Load: The data transfer instructions that copies data from memory to a register is traditionally called load.The format of the load instruction is ... register to be stored,then offset to select the array element and finally the base register.

Description : Which are the not causes of the interrupt: a. In any single device b. In processor poll devices c. Itis an external analogy to exception d. None of these

Last Answer : c. Itis an external analogy to exception

Description : Match the following mechanisms for interrupting the execution of a process and their uses. i) Interrupt a) Call to an operating system function ii) Trap b) Reaction to an asynchronous external event iii) Supervisor Call c) Handling of a error ... -a, iii-b C) i-b, ii-c, iii-a D) i-a, ii-c, iii-b

Last Answer : C) i-b, ii-c, iii-a

Description : What are the components of memory management unit?

Last Answer : 1. A facility for dynamic storage relocation that maps logical memory references into physical memory addresses. 2. A provision for sharing common programs stored in memory by ... information against unauthorized access between users and preventing users from changing operating system functions.

Description : What is Polling?

Last Answer : The process of periodically checking the status of an I/O device to determine the need to service the device.

Description : What is Virtual Memory?

Last Answer : A technique that uses main memory as a cache for secondary storage, usually implemented with magnetic disks. Virtual memory used to allow efficient and safe sharing of memory among multiple programs.

Description : What is Direct mapped cache?

Last Answer : A cache structure in which each memory location is mapped to exactly one location (address) in the cache. This done by (Block Address) modulo (Number of blocks in the cache).

Description : What is meant by Bus arbitration?

Last Answer : It is a way of sharing the computer’s data transferring channels in an optimal way so that faster devices won’t have to wait to be able to transfer and the slower devices will have a chance to transfer as well

Description : What are the various memory technologies?

Last Answer : Flash memory, RAM – Random Access Memory, ROM – Read Only Memory etc

Description : State the advantages of virtual memory?

Last Answer : Virtual memory is feature of OS that allows a computer to compensate for shortage of physical memory by temporarily transferring pages of data from Random Access Memory to Disk

Description : Point out how DMA can improve I/O speed.

Last Answer : DMA is implemented with a specialized controller that transfers data between an I/O device and memory independent of the processor The DMA controller becomes the master and directs the reads and writes between itself and memory. During data transfer is not routed through the processors

Description : What is the need to implement memory as a hierarchy?

Last Answer : The aim of the memory hierarchy is to match the processors speed with the rate of information transfer at a lowest level and at a minimum possible cost

Description : What is the purpose of dirty/modified bit in Cache memory?

Last Answer : To tackle whether a page has been written since it was read into the memory, o dirty but is added to the page table.

Description : Explain out of order execution.

Last Answer : It is a situation in pipelined execution when an instruction blocked from executing does not cause the following instructions to wait.

Description : Explain dynamic pipeline scheduling.

Last Answer : Here with the hardware support we perform the reordering of the order of instruction execution so as to avoid stalls.

Description : What are Superscalar processors?

Last Answer : It is an advanced pipelining technique that enables the processor to execute more than one instruction per clock cycle.

Description : What is multiple issue? Write any two approaches.

Last Answer : Multiple issues is a scheme whereby multiple instructions are launched in one clock cycle. It is a method for increasing the potential amount of instruction-level parallelism. It is done by replicating the ... 1. Static multiple issue (at compile time) 2. Dynamic multiple issue (at run time)

Description : What is multicore'?

Last Answer : At its simplest, multi-core is a design in which a single physical processor contains the core logic of more than one processor. The multi-core design takes several such processor "cores" ... to enable a system to run more tasks simultaneously and thereby achieve greater overall system performance.

Description : What is fine grained multithreading?

Last Answer : This multithreading switch between threads on each instruction, resulting in interleaved execution of multiple treads

Description : Compare UMA and NUMA multiprocessors?

Last Answer : UMA: Multiprocessors take about same time to access main memory no matter which processors request it and no matter which word is requested. NUMA: Some memory accesses are much faster than others, depending on which processors ask for the word.

Description : 5. Differentiate between Strong Scaling and Weak Scaling?

Last Answer : Strong scaling: Measuring speedup by increasing the size of the problem Weak scaling: The program size grows proportionally to the increase in the number of processors

Description : What is Flynn’s classification?

Last Answer : SISD – Single Instruction Single DataStream SIMD – Single Instruction Multiple DataStream MISD – Multiple Instruction Multiple DataStream MIMD – Multiple Instruction Multiple DataStream

Description : What is meant by hardware multithreading?

Last Answer : Hardware multithreading allows multiple threads to share the functional units of a single processor in an overlapping fashion to try to utilize the hardware resources efficiently. To permit this sharing ... duplicate the independent state of each thread. It Increases the utilization of a processor.