🎯 OS Interview Questions — Quick Reference
A curated collection of 60+ interview questions covering all major Operating System topics. Each topic has its own detailed file with comprehensive answers, diagrams, and numerical examples.
📂 Topic-Wise Question Banks ⚡ Top 10 Most-Asked Questions (Quick Fire) These are the questions you are most likely to get in an interview:
#
Question
Topic
1
What is the difference between a Process and a Thread?
General
2
What is a Deadlock? What are the four necessary conditions?
Sync
3
What is a Race Condition? How do you prevent it?
Sync
4
What is Virtual Memory?
Memory
5
What is Paging? How does address translation work?
Memory
6
Compare FCFS, SJF, SRTF, Priority, and Round Robin.
CPU
7
What is a Page Fault? What happens when one occurs?
Memory
8
What is the difference between a Mutex and a Semaphore?
Sync
9
What is Thrashing?
Memory
10
Explain the Producer-Consumer problem.
Sync
Always draw diagrams — Interviewers love Gantt charts, memory maps, and state diagrams.Know the trade-offs — Every algorithm has pros and cons. Say both.Be ready for numericals — Practice calculating WT, TAT, and head movements by hand.Connect to real systems — Mention that Linux uses CFS, that SSDs make disk scheduling less relevant, etc.Understand the code — If asked to implement, the C++ code in this repo is interview-ready.
🏢 Where These Questions Are Asked
Company
Common Focus Areas
Google Process/Thread, Synchronization, Virtual Memory
Amazon Deadlocks, Scheduling, IPC
Microsoft Memory Management, Paging, System Calls
Apple Scheduling, Synchronization Primitives
FAANG (General) All of the above + Numericals
University Exams Everything with heavy focus on numericals