1. Contrast the performance of the three techniques for allocating disk blocks (contiguous, linked, and indexed) for both sequential and random file access.
2. What are the advantages of the variant of linked allocation that uses a FAT to chain together the blocks of a file?
3. Consider a system where free space is kept in a free-space list.
a. Suppose that the pointer to the free-space list is lost. Can the system reconstruct the free-space list? Explain your answer.
b. Consider a file system similar to the one used by UNIX with indexed allocation. How many disk I/O operations might be required to read the contents of a small local file at /a/b/c? Assume that none of the disk blocks is currently being cached.
c. Suggest a scheme to ensure that the pointer is never lost as a result of memory failure.