I have spent the last year developing an Operating System as my Bsc dissertation. In September I will begin a PhD, the focus of which firmly resides in OS design.
I may be under qualified to say this, but I believe pretty strongly that the number of people that truly understand everything that happens when they use a computer is tending towards zero. This is partially the fault of rising hardware complexity, but more fundamentally your Intel/AMD CPU, your SSD etc is not open source. It is unlikely then that you will be able to understand exactly what your computer is doing when you execute an instruction, because Intel will not tell you how it works, only that it does. You could of course reverse engineer the chips, but I do not believe that anybody has.
There are a number of places you can go to learn more about how modern systems work, I will list the fruitful resources I have used below.
- wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page
This wiki has a lot of valuable information, if you have not already found it.
The Intel manuals describe how the CPU frontend functions, but does not explain how this functionality is implemented on the backend. The problem here is volume. The combined volumes weigh in at over 3300 pages.
I may be under qualified to say this, but I believe pretty strongly that the number of people that truly understand everything that happens when they use a computer is tending towards zero. This is partially the fault of rising hardware complexity, but more fundamentally your Intel/AMD CPU, your SSD etc is not open source. It is unlikely then that you will be able to understand exactly what your computer is doing when you execute an instruction, because Intel will not tell you how it works, only that it does. You could of course reverse engineer the chips, but I do not believe that anybody has.
There are a number of places you can go to learn more about how modern systems work, I will list the fruitful resources I have used below.
- wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page
This wiki has a lot of valuable information, if you have not already found it.
- www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectures-software-developer-manuals.html?iid=tech_vt_tech+64-32_manuals
The Intel manuals describe how the CPU frontend functions, but does not explain how this functionality is implemented on the backend. The problem here is volume. The combined volumes weigh in at over 3300 pages.
- scholar.google.com
- Wikipedia
I hope this has been helpful - good luck!