2  Plan

Yes—this is still realistic, especially because you solved the material before. You are reactivating knowledge, not learning the entire course from zero.

The crucial change is: do not redo all ten sheets sequentially. They contain research, programming, and practical tasks that are useful pedagogically but inefficient for a written exam. The sheets collapse into about seven examinable clusters.

Priority hierarchy

Priority 1: direct reference-exam matches

These should become automatic:

  • fork(), process trees and process states
  • Race conditions, semaphores and synchronization
  • Deadlocks, resource-allocation graphs and Banker’s algorithm
  • Paging, page-table calculations and address translation
  • FAT and i-nodes
  • Protocol layers, encapsulation and addressing
  • Subnetting, prefixes and forwarding tables
  • Dijkstra and Bellman–Ford

Priority 2: likely supporting material

  • Page replacement: FIFO, LRU and Clock
  • TLB and reference bits
  • CPU scheduling
  • IP fragmentation
  • Disk scheduling and RAID
  • Memory fragmentation and allocation algorithms

Priority 3: postpone unless time remains

  • Long programming exercises
  • Internet research and API-detail questions
  • Traceroute, Whois and Wireshark experiments
  • Historical hardware details
  • Learning-methodology questions
  • Reimplementing FAT, Banker, LRU or producer–consumer in code

For programming exercises, understand the underlying algorithm and execute it by hand. Do not spend hours coding it again.

Ten-day core plan

Assume approximately 4–6 focused hours per day. If you have 11–13 days, use the extra days for consolidation rather than expanding the syllabus.

Day Focus Essential exercises and outcomes
1 Diagnostic + processes Attempt the 2016 exam under time pressure, even if incomplete. Then review Sheet 2 A2(a), A3. Know fork() return values, process trees and the five process states.
2 Synchronization Sheet 3 A1, A2 and A4(a–b). Trace a race condition instruction by instruction; repair it with semaphores; understand wait, signal, mutexes and condition variables.
3 Paging fundamentals Sheet 4 A5, A7; Sheet 5 A2, A6. Split addresses into page number/offset, construct page-table entries, and calculate normal/inverted page-table sizes.
4 Advanced paging and virtual memory Sheet 5 A8; Sheet 6 A1, A4. Multilevel tables, TLB, FIFO/LRU/Clock and reference-bit approximation.
5 Deadlocks and scheduling Sheet 8 A2 and A4 first; A6 if time remains. Know the four deadlock conditions, resource graphs, Banker matrices and hand execution.
6 File systems Sheet 7 A4 and A5; review the FAT mechanism from A2 without implementing it. Practise i-node maximum-file-size and pathname traversal calculations.
7 Network stack Sheet 9 A4 and A9. Reconstruct encapsulation, endpoints and addressing at each layer; then practise IP fragmentation.
8 Subnetting and forwarding Sheet 10 A2, A3 and A4. Work entirely from scratch: masks, address counts, network/host IDs, prefixes and longest-prefix matching.
9 Routing algorithms Sheet 10 A5 and A6(c); 2016 exam Question 5. Complete Dijkstra tables, derive next hops from predecessor pointers, and perform Bellman–Ford updates.
10 Timed mixed mock + repair Assemble unused exercise parts into a 90-minute mock. Mark it immediately. Redo every incorrect question from a blank page without consulting the solution.

If you have 11–13 days

Use the additional days as follows:

  • Day 11: Repair your weakest two topics.
  • Day 12: Second full timed mock covering all major clusters.
  • Day 13: Light closed-book recall, formulas and common mistakes. No major new topics.

If you have only ten days, the core plan already covers the important material. Do not sacrifice mock-exam practice to squeeze in every supplementary topic.

How to structure each study day

A good five-hour day would look like this:

  1. 30 minutes: closed-book retrieval
    • Write everything remembered from yesterday.
    • Reproduce algorithms, definitions and calculation procedures.
  2. 60–75 minutes: targeted theory recovery
    • Use the summary only to repair what you could not recall.
    • Avoid reading an entire chapter passively.
  3. Two 75-minute problem blocks
    • Solve selected exercises without notes.
    • Work in a handwritten, exam-style format.
    • Impose time limits.
  4. 30 minutes: correction and error log
    • Record each substantive mistake.
    • Classify its cause: forgotten fact, wrong method, arithmetic error or misreading.
  5. 20–30 minutes: delayed repetition
    • Reattempt one problem from two or three days earlier.

If you have only three hours, keep the same structure but shorten the theory section—not the problem-solving section.

Build an error log, not another long summary

Use five columns:

Topic Mistake Cause Correct rule/method Retest
Subnetting Used \(2^h\) as usable-host count Forgot network/broadcast addresses Normally \(2^h-2\), unless stated otherwise Tomorrow
Dijkstra Updated an already-finalized node Algorithm rule forgotten Nodes in \(N'\) are final In two days

Your final revision should be driven primarily by this list.

Learn reusable solution templates

For each major exam type, have a standard procedure:

  • fork(): draw one branch per call; label parent and child return values.
  • Race condition: expand operations into load–modify–store and show the interleaving.
  • Banker: calculate available resources, find a satisfiable process, release its allocation, repeat.
  • Paging: derive offset bits from page size, then split the logical address.
  • I-node: calculate pointers per indirect block before calculating capacity.
  • Subnetting: determine required host bits, then prefix length, block size and aligned boundaries.
  • Longest-prefix matching: list all matching prefixes and choose the longest.
  • Dijkstra: maintain \(N'\), \(D(v)\) and \(p(v)\) systematically.
  • Bellman–Ford: minimize link cost plus the neighbour’s advertised distance.

The most important rule

Do not measure progress by “pages read” or “sheets reviewed.” Measure it by:

Can I solve this problem from a blank page, correctly and within exam time?

After about five days, some topics will already feel substantially more familiar. That is the advantage of having solved the sheets before. A focused ten-day recovery is much more plausible than the current breadth of the material makes it appear.