Operating System Internals and Administration Questions

Fundamental and advanced operating system concepts that underlie system administration across platforms. Topics include process and thread management, scheduling and concurrency, memory management and swapping, virtual memory and page replacement, input output and disk performance, file system architecture and semantics, system call interfaces, kernel parameters and tuning, authentication and permission models, boot and initialization sequences, monitoring and system performance analysis, and general techniques for debugging and diagnosing systemic operating system issues. Candidates should be able to explain not only how to perform administrative tasks but why the underlying mechanisms behave as they do and how design choices affect performance and reliability.

HardSystem Design

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Design a verification and repair strategy for large filesystems (XFS or ZFS) in production: how you detect corruption (scrubbing, checksums, SMART), when to take nodes offline, how to use filesystem-specific repair tools (xfs_repair, zpool scrub), backup/restore considerations, and how to automate and test the process.

EasyTechnical

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Describe fork(), execve(), and vfork() semantics on Linux. Explain copy-on-write behavior, what memory is shared between parent and child after fork, and why many programs use fork+exec rather than fork only. As an SRE, when would you be concerned about fork in production services?

HardTechnical

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Design a least-privilege policy for a microservice: consider SUID/SGID removal, Linux capabilities, seccomp syscall filtering, and AppArmor/SELinux confinement. Explain how you would test and roll out these constraints without breaking functionality and how you'd handle required privileged operations.

EasyTechnical

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Compare cron and systemd timers for scheduling periodic work. Describe when to prefer systemd timers (accuracy, missed-run handling, unit coupling) vs cron (simplicity, portability) and how to convert a cron job into a systemd timer with proper service unit semantics.

HardTechnical

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A high-throughput database shows suboptimal performance due to page-cache behavior. Explain how you would tune Linux VM parameters (vm.dirty_ratio, vm.dirty_background_ratio, vm.vfs_cache_pressure, vm.swappiness) and filesystem mount options to optimize for large database workloads. Discuss trade-offs and testing approaches.

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