[sk1pper]

In the vein of learning how computers work, osdev has got to be pretty high up there. It’s so much fun - it has become my hobby. I’m surprised no one else seems to have mentioned it.

I just finished implementing a really basic network stack for my x86 kernel, including a (crappy) driver for the RTL 8139 network card. I just learned a ton about how the internet works. I learned it all in college, but there’s something different about grappling with it directly.

And I’ve gotten pretty good at C in the meantime. I’ve also learned a ton about virtual memory, page tables, system calls, various hardware, how data is stored on disk, the ELF file format, how processes are loaded and executed, the x86 calling convention, a little bit of assembly code, just to name a few.

Check out https://wiki.osdev.org for where to start. I’m hoping to start writing some blog posts about all of this soon, to provide a resource to complement the osdev wiki. A lot of info on this is surprisingly hard to dig up.