Start Here
This atlas has one throughline: go from "I can program" to "I understand the machine." You can read any note on its own, but the branches are ordered as a descent and a climb. Here's the path.
The path
- Reset your mental model — Machine Model. How the hardware actually works under the runtime. Almost no code; everything else hangs off it.
- Descend into C — C from the Metal, then Pointers & Memory. The language and the manual memory management that make you responsible for everything.
- See the metal — Assembly & Compiler Output and Toolchain & Linking. What the compiler emits, and the pipeline that builds and debugs it.
- (Optional) C++ — Modern C++. RAII and the rest. Skip it on the first pass if you want; the OS is C-first.
- Climb back to systems — Systems Programming and Concurrency & Performance. Talk to the kernel; make it fast.
- Build the machine — OS from Scratch. The project that consumes all of the above.
Running through all of it: Craftsmanship Low-Level — the testing and review discipline that keeps bare-metal work honest.
How to read it
- Notes are atomic and source-backed. Each branch index lists its planned notes and the canonical sources behind them.
- The OS target is x86-64 via cross-compiler + QEMU — host-agnostic, so it runs the same on Intel and Apple Silicon.
- Assembly is x86-64 primary with an ARM64 appendix per note.
See also: Must Know · Full Index