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Comment by Nightshaxx | Hacker News Reader

How can I get started on learning the low level c stuff with direct system calls and such. I learned about assembly, pipelining, cache, and memory allocation during a systems architecture course, so I'm really interested in the low level of the machine. The problem is I don't really have an idea of a project that I could do to learn the level right above. Of course I learned a bit during the course, but I really want to get a solid grasp.

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I'd recommend writing something you might have used or be familiar with, in bare-metal C. Maybe try writing a simple web server, which is something most people will be familiar with. Try doing it a couple different ways: single-threaded, prefork (processes), event-based with select/kqueue/epoll. Write your own data structures: hash tables, linked lists, etc.

This sounds simple but will give you a good tour of a lot of different areas: BSD sockets, named pipes/unix domain sockets for cross-thread communication, signals, memory management, threading, basic scheduling, and parallel programming (locks/concurrency), to name a few.

If you really want to understand modern x64 or other ASM, write a simplified compiler for C. I would recommend starting with a tiny subset of the language focused on whatever aspects you want to understand. You can then compare your output with a modern compiler to get a better understanding of the intricacies involved.

You might find my other posts in this thread a good starting point for your study.

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