Question 1

How many questions come from System Software and Operating System in UGC NET Computer Science Paper 2?

Accepted Answer

There is no published quota for any unit. What is distinctive here is that the count is lumpy rather than steady — because the examiners like to attach several questions to one shared table or passage, a single disk specification or a Banker's algorithm scenario can be worth five marks on its own. That makes the unit high-variance and worth preparing properly.

Question 2

How much of this unit is calculation rather than theory?

Accepted Answer

Most of it. Scheduling averages, disk head movement and geometry, page-fault counts, effective access time and page-table sizing are all worked numerically. The theory pockets are smaller and quite predictable: the contents of a process control block, what privileged instructions may do, what mutual exclusion guarantees, and the trade-offs between file allocation methods.

Question 3

If I only have a week for this unit, what should I practise first?

Accepted Answer

Disk scheduling and disk geometry first, then CPU scheduling averages, then Banker's algorithm and paging arithmetic. Between them these four account for the large majority of questions from this unit in recent papers, and all four are calculated rather than recalled.

Question 4

Do I need to know Linux commands and shell scripting?

Accepted Answer

At a basic level, yes. The syllabus lists Unix and Linux fundamentals, and papers have asked about kernel interrupt levels and about what a sequence of fork calls prints. You are not asked to write a shell script, but you are expected to read a short C program using fork and work out how many processes it creates.

Question 5

Should I learn all the page replacement algorithms or just FIFO and LRU?

Accepted Answer

FIFO, LRU and optimal are the three worth knowing properly, because the questions compare their fault counts on one supplied reference string. Since the comparison is the question, recognising the algorithm names is not enough — you need to be able to simulate each of them quickly on paper.

System Software and Operating System

Available Practice Sets

Every System Software and Operating System question ever asked

What this topic covers

Key concepts to revise

How to prepare this topic

Common mistakes to avoid

Related Topics

Frequently Asked Questions

How should I practice System Software and Operating System for UGC NET?

Are these System Software and Operating System practice sets free?

How many questions are in each set?