Hardware Foundations Interview Questions
What is the fetch-decode-execute cycle?
What are CPU registers, and what are the roles of the program counter and stack pointer?
Why doesn't a higher CPU clock speed always mean a program will run faster?
What is the difference between user mode and kernel mode?
How does the CPU enforce privilege levels?
What is a privileged instruction? Give some examples.
What happens during a transition from user mode to kernel mode?
Does a process run in kernel mode if it is started by the root user?
If all applications run in user mode, what prevents one application from reading another application's memory?
What is the memory hierarchy, and why is it necessary?
What is the difference between a cache hit and a cache miss?
What is a cache line, and why is sequential memory access often faster than random access?
What are temporal locality and spatial locality?
What is the difference between an interrupt, an exception, and a trap?
Why are timer interrupts essential for preemptive multitasking?