Multitasking and resources
Practice Flashcards
Flip to reveal answersConcurrency or parallelism on a single core?
Track your progress — Sign up free to save your progress and get smart review reminders based on spaced repetition.
All 5 Flashcards — Multitasking and resources
Sign up free to track progress and get spaced-repetition review schedules.
Question
Concurrency or parallelism on a single core?
Answer
**Concurrency.** Several tasks are in progress but only one executes at any instant. Parallelism needs more than one core.
Question
What happens in a context switch?
Answer
**Save** the running process's registers and program counter, choose the next, **restore** its state, resume it exactly where it stopped.
Question
Why is a context switch expensive beyond the save and restore?
Answer
The incoming process finds the **cache full of the previous one's data**, so its first memory accesses miss and are slow.
Question
What are the four conditions for deadlock?
Answer
**Mutual exclusion, hold-and-wait, no pre-emption, circular wait** — all four at once. Break any one and deadlock cannot occur.
Question
Deadlock or starvation?
Answer
**Deadlock**: nobody can ever proceed. **Starvation**: the system runs fine but one process never gets a turn — fixed by **ageing**.
Read the notes
Full study notes for Multitasking and resources
Topic 1.3 hub
Operating and control systems
More from Topic 1.3
All flashcards in this topic
Computer Science exam skills
Paper structures & tips
Track your progress with spaced repetition
Sign up free — Aimnova tells you exactly which cards to review and when, so you remember everything before your IB exam.
Start Free