GATEOperating Systems
Operating Systems for GATE
~9 marks — concurrency and deadlock is the densest area.
📊 ~6 Q · ~9 marks (9% of the paper)🧵
How toppers play this section
Operating Systems questions are computational far more often than descriptive, and each chapter has a signature numerical. Process questions are fork-counting exercises plus the shared-versus-private table for threads, both of which are pure bookkeeping. Scheduling questions are Gantt charts followed by an arithmetic mean, where the marks are lost to arrival times and tie-breaking rather than to conceptual confusion. Concurrency is the densest area, covering semaphore ordering, the banker's algorithm and the minimum-resource formula. Memory management is address-field splitting and effective access time, and Belady's anomaly is the recurring conceptual question. File systems reduce to inode arithmetic: maximum file size and the number of accesses to reach a given byte.
Chapters
Built to the GATE blueprint — notes, shortcuts, solved PYQ-style examples and practice in every chapter.
Topic-wise weightage in GATE
Expected question counts from previous-year paper analyses. Topics with an arrow already have a full chapter.
| Topic | GATE CS — single 3-hour CBT paper Q | Score used for M.Tech admission / PSU recruitment Q | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processes, Threads, System Calls & IPC | ~1-2 | High | |
| CPU & I/O Scheduling | ~2 | Very high | |
| Concurrency, Synchronization & Deadlock | ~2-3 | Very high | |
| Memory Management & Virtual Memory | ~2 | Very high | |
| File Systems | ~1 | Medium |
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