Free space management in Operating Systems - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Free Space Management in Operating Systems

📖 Scenario: You are learning how operating systems keep track of free space on a disk. This helps the system know where new files can be stored.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple representation of free space management using a list to track free blocks on a disk.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list called free_blocks with exact block numbers

Add a variable total_blocks to represent total disk blocks

Use a loop to find all free blocks less than a given threshold

Add a final statement to mark the end of free space tracking

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Operating systems must manage disk space efficiently to store and retrieve files without errors.

💼 Career

Understanding free space management is important for system administrators and software developers working with file systems.

1

Create the initial free blocks list

Create a list called free_blocks with these exact block numbers: 2, 5, 7, 10, and 15.

Operating Systems

# Create the free_blocks list with the specified block numbers
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create a list and separate numbers with commas.

2

Add total disk blocks variable

Add a variable called total_blocks and set it to 20 to represent the total number of blocks on the disk.

Operating Systems

free_blocks = [2, 5, 7, 10, 15]
# Add total_blocks variable with value 20
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 20 to the variable total_blocks.

3

Find free blocks below a threshold

Use a for loop with variable block to go through free_blocks. Create a new list called low_free_blocks that includes only blocks less than 10.

Operating Systems

free_blocks = [2, 5, 7, 10, 15]
total_blocks = 20
# Create low_free_blocks list with blocks less than 10
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list comprehension to filter blocks less than 10.

4

Mark the end of free space tracking

Add a variable called end_marker and set it to "END" to indicate the end of free space tracking.

Operating Systems

free_blocks = [2, 5, 7, 10, 15]
total_blocks = 20
low_free_blocks = [block for block in free_blocks if block < 10]
# Add end_marker variable with value "END"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the string "END" to the variable end_marker.