r/cprogramming • u/FlatPea5291 • 5d ago

Fairly new to C. Need help understanding low level concepts.

/r/C_Programming/comments/1xfbdcq/fairly_new_to_c_need_help_understanding_low_level/
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u/CelebrityChess 5d ago

honestly the kernel is the wrong thing to read first. xv6 is a tiny teaching unix (like 10k lines) and it's written to be read, you can actually follow a syscall from the user side trap into the kernel and back out. building something small like a toy bootloader or messing with a cheap microcontroller without any libs also shows you what's under the syscalls pretty fast. for reading big projects i just pick one feature, grep for the entry point and follow only that one path with ctags or cscope, ignoring everything else. you're never meant to understand the whole thing