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Operating Systems, in 10 cards

No chapters to read. Each card gives you the one-line answer, a picture, a quick try-it and the trap interviewers hope you fall into. About 15 minutes for all ten.

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Card 1 of 10 · Processes & threads

Process vs thread: what is the difference?

Say this first

A process is a running program with its own memory. Threads live inside a process and share its memory.

Picture it

Process

  • • Own address space
  • • Heavy to create and switch
  • • Crash stays isolated
  • • Talk via IPC (pipes, sockets)

Try it

Two threads of one process both change the same global variable. What can go wrong?

Common trap

Saying threads have separate memory. They share the heap; only the stack is private.

Say it like this

A process has its own memory space, while threads share their process's memory, which makes them cheaper but needs synchronisation.

Full Operating Systems notes

Want the rest?

The free cards cover the core. The full notes add 14 more cards in the same style, plus a cheat sheet:

  • • Fork/exec, zombie processes, IPC, user vs kernel threads
  • • SRTF, semaphores, dining philosophers, the Banker's algorithm with a worked example
  • • TLB and effective access time, file allocation, inodes, disk scheduling
  • • Interrupts vs polling, priority inversion, monolithic vs microkernel
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