I've only skim-read your articles so far, but it looks excellent. Congratulations and please keep doing work like this. I previously worked as a research engineer (a fancy name for a software engineer working in a university lab, in my case doing computer security research) so believe me when I say there are graduate students who don't have your grasp of operating systems (see the comments elsewhere on OS courses being optional).
> Apparently everything online about how operating systems and CPUs work is terrible.
Unfortunately finding good information is not easy, but it is out there - you've proven it by synthesizing some of that hard to find information into a better form. My degree is in mathematics, but my computing knowledge is self taught. Knowing how to learn in this way and to be able to communicate highly technical information in an approachable manner are incredibly important skills and not to be underestimated.
I have two links to share - I limited myself to two because we could be here a long time otherwise:
1. https://git.lain.faith/sys64738/airs-notes.git (TOC for linker part here: https://lwn.net/Articles/276782/) - you've scratched the surface of ELFs and linking. This is a 20-article blog series by Ian Lance Taylor plus miscellaneous extra topics containing everything you ever wanted to know about ELFs and quite a bit that will likely make you wonder how any of your commands are actually even working! There's even a brief mention of ELF's companion, DWARF, which amongst other things is a virtual machine used every time a C++ exception is triggered.
2. Have you seen this excellent project? https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/ - essentially a human-readable walkthrough of how the Linux kernel does stuff. Has almost certainly been shared on HN before.
Oh, that’s awesome, it even has some things transcribed from Fengrui Song’s blog (https://maskray.me/) as well—I sometimes feel like it’s the only place where some particulars of binutils(-compatible) behaviour are documented (I don’t come there for the generalities, though, like GP is seeking). I only wish there were more of these transcriptions :)
> Apparently everything online about how operating systems and CPUs work is terrible.
Unfortunately finding good information is not easy, but it is out there - you've proven it by synthesizing some of that hard to find information into a better form. My degree is in mathematics, but my computing knowledge is self taught. Knowing how to learn in this way and to be able to communicate highly technical information in an approachable manner are incredibly important skills and not to be underestimated.
I have two links to share - I limited myself to two because we could be here a long time otherwise:
1. https://git.lain.faith/sys64738/airs-notes.git (TOC for linker part here: https://lwn.net/Articles/276782/) - you've scratched the surface of ELFs and linking. This is a 20-article blog series by Ian Lance Taylor plus miscellaneous extra topics containing everything you ever wanted to know about ELFs and quite a bit that will likely make you wonder how any of your commands are actually even working! There's even a brief mention of ELF's companion, DWARF, which amongst other things is a virtual machine used every time a C++ exception is triggered.
2. Have you seen this excellent project? https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/ - essentially a human-readable walkthrough of how the Linux kernel does stuff. Has almost certainly been shared on HN before.