Spring 2026, CSCI 347, Test 3 Review

Test date: Wednesday, June 10 2026, 8:00am

Quick Review: Parts of chapters 6(part), 7(part), 8(part), 10, 11, 12, 13 (part) and your microshell.

Topic Review:

• System Information (Chapter 6)
• /etc, information stored there
• uname(1), uname(3)
• time related functions (time, ctime, strftime, gettimeofday, ...)
• time zone issues
• Environment of UNIX process (Chapter 7)
• main, argc, argv
• exit, _exit
• atexit
• environment, getenv, putenv, setenv, unsetenv
• Memory layout, malloc, alloca, free, realloc, calloc
• automatic (local) variable misuse
• setjmp, longjmp
• resource limits
• Process Control (Chapter 8)
  • race conditions
  • execve(2) and information that "crosses the execve boundry"
  • changing UIDs/GIDs
  • #! in scripts
• Signals (Chapter 10)
• signal(3)
• various signals
• interrupted system calls
• kill(2) and raise(3)
• alarm(2) and pause(3)
• use of system/library calls in handlers
• abort(3)
• sigaction(2)
• sigprocmask
• sigsetops
• sigsetjmp/siglongjmp
• Threads (Chapter 11) and other concurrency problems and constructs
• Basic concurrency -- multiple threads
• Concurrency vs. Parallel vs. Distributed
• Multiple CPU
• Use for threads
• Elements of a thread
• POSIX Threads
• PThreads - create, join, cancel, cleanup_push/pop, pthread_detach
• Thread Synchronization
• Race conditions
• Critical sections
• Mutual Exclusion, Mutex (PThread mutexes)
• Mutex create, lock, unlock, destroy
• Deadlock
• Readers/Writers problem, read/write locks, PThread variety
• Bounded Buffer Problem, Semaphores, binary and counting
• Bounded Buffer solution with semaphores
• Monitors, language based solution, condition variables
• PThreads condition variables, implementation of monitors in C
• Dining Philosophers, solution
• Barriers, PThread barriers
• Amdahl's Law
• Thread Control (Chapter 12)
• Thread Attributes
• Reentrancy, reentrant system calls, "thread safe"
• Thread Specific Data
• PThread thread specific data, keys and get/set routines
• Threads and signals
• Threads and fork
• Threads and I/O, pread(2) and pwrite(2)
• Daemon Processes (Chapter 13)
• fork(), parent exit
• daemon(3)
• disassociates from controlling terminal
• closes 0, 1, 2, may open log file
• micro shell and thread assignments
• command expansion
• pipeline implementation