Know the stuff from the last exam. There will not be any questions on this exam that are exclusively about the material from the last one, but there may well be questions that ask you to related the new material and the old.

Contention

Deadlock

Be able to construct, identify deadlock from two processes

Know the three conditions necessary for deadlock (sufficient?)

Cannot predict and avoid

Cannot (perfectly) detect or resolve.

Can prevent absolutely by denying one of three conditions (but at what cost?)

Can reduce by good programming practices (what practices?)

Use as few unsharable resources as possible

Do not overlap use of unsharables more than necessary

Can recover from deadlock-caused losses by good programming practices

Logs

Rollbacks

BACKUPS!!!

Can prevent with test_and_set – cooperation between system and good,

conscientious, knowledgeable programmers

Lost update

Be able to construct, identify lost update from two processes

Locking

Granularity

Be particularly clear about the difference between lost update and deadlock – they’re related but very different. Both caused by two processes that share resources (broadly defined) but one results in loss of data (often without any sign that it has happened) and one results in loss of use of resources and lockup of processes, and is usually VERY obvious.

Photoshop

Layers

What are GIF and JPEG

What is an animated GIF

Flash

Layers

What is tweening

What are vector graphics, what’s their relation to bitmap/raster graphics