title: OS Concepts Terminology
body: <p>I'm doing some fill in the blanks from a sample exam for my class and I was hoping you could double check my terminology. </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>The various scheduling queues used by the operating system would consist of lists of <strong>processes</strong>.</li>
  <li><strong>Interrupt handling</strong> is the technique of periodically checking to see if a condition (such as completion of some requested I/O operation) has been met.</li>
  <li>When the CPU is in <strong>kernel mode</strong>, a running program has access to a restricted set of CPU functionality.</li>
  <li>The job of the <strong>CPU scheduler</strong> is to select a process on the ready queue and change its state.</li>
  <li>The CPU normally supports a vector of <strong>interrupts</strong> so the OS can respond appropriately when some event of interest occurs in the hardware.</li>
  <li>Using <strong>traps</strong>, a device controller can use idle time on the bus to read from or write to main memory.</li>
  <li>During a <strong>context switch</strong>, the state of one process is copied from the CPU and saved, and the state of a different process is restored.</li>
  <li>An operating system consists of a kernel and a collection of <strong>application</strong> programs that run as user processes and either provide OS services to the user or work in the background to keep the computer running smooth.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>There are so many terms from our chapters, I am not quite sure if I am using the correct ones.</p>