Every time I start to fall into the conceit that I'm an exceptionally good developer, I look at things like kernels or low level hardware programming and eat a big ol' slice of humble pie.
Nice. Way back in the day, maybe 20-25 years ago, I had a first look at the boot process and wish I'd had something similar to the first chapter then. Man, it was hard to find information and ones you did you realized understanding it meant learning an entirely new subject.<p>Those were the days really. Barely having started my English studies I went looking for a single piece of information and found so much else on the way.. The tinkering and nights of frustration gave insights and a feeling of accomplishment that set me on the path to the profession I have today.<p>Then I started high school and someone showed me a shaded and textured cube they had rotating on their screen and I found out what math is good for :)
Besides some scattered text files and the Linux man pages, there is this: <a href="https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/</a><p>It's fairly new - started about a year ago, but there's quite a lot of stuff in there already (bootstrapped from the old XML stuff, I believe).
I've taken a class in college about the Linux kernel, and it's still amazing to see how complicated it actually is.<p>I've got a fairly good idea of how many pieces work, but the whole thing together still puzzles me at times.<p>I think that it's one of the biggest achievements of the internet as a tool for progress, and it shows that good intentions and pragmatism (together with some good Linus insults as well) can go a long way
I love this work, it inspired me to work on Inside LibreOffice.<p><a href="https://www.gitbook.com/book/chrissherlock1/inside-libreoffice/details" rel="nofollow">https://www.gitbook.com/book/chrissherlock1/inside-libreoffi...</a>
Oh my God, the first article has a link to Ralph Brown's Interrupt List. Good ol' days!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int.htm</a>
Torvald's thesis on portability of Linux is also a quite interesting article<p><a href="https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/index_files/linus.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/index_files/linus.pdf</a>
Is there any documentation that talks about x86_64 and the modern UEFI boot process? This guide still talks about BIOSs, MBRs, real mode, 16-bit registers, etc.