Lab 4 is fiendishly difficult, but you end up learning a lot.
Beyond all that, there's no substitute for just diving in and breaking stuff. Just go with whatever area you find the most fun. Maybe that's compiling and modifying the Linux kernel, or maybe it's tweaking a software rasterizer like
https://github.com/blitzcode/rust-exp.
I got into systems programming mainly as a consequence of being a game developer -- when you write your own engines, you're forced to consider a hundred low-level details like memory layout, pipelining, threading, simulation, adding a scripting interface for your designers, cursing AMD when you run into GPU driver bugs, etc. There are a lifetime worth of interesting problems to solve in that area.
Nah, I thought it was a good point. It's easy to forget that we either change or become obsolete. It's one thing to know it abstractly, but it's hard to make any lifestyle changes, especially if it involves switching to a job in a completely new domain.
I wish it was worth a lot to be good at systems programming these days. It seems like the huge salaries are for rails senior devs. I spent like ten years getting really good at this stuff (the (low + high)/2 line jumped right out at me) but nowadays it feels like being really good at trivial pursuit.
It's interesting how much things have changed in the last decade. I wonder what next decade's "Rails" will be? Could it be possible to predict?
As a male, I'd personally prefer to live a life filled with traditional housewife work. Kids are fun, and I'd like raising them. I like cooking. Cleaning is pretty fun. More than that, though, employment sucks. If you keep me fed, clothed, and with an internet connection, I'd be happy as a clam, even spending eight hours a day doing nothing but housework. I sometimes wonder if there are others who feel this way, especially women who are mostly forced to work nowadays.
There's a strange sort of situation: In the past, women were forced to be housewives, which was awful. Nobody should be forced to be something they don't want to be. But now that women have the ability to do mostly whatever a man can do, neither men nor women really have the option of just "being a housewife." We kind of both have to work. I wonder if it would be better if, as a family unit, one person decides to do the housewife-type stuff, and the other decides to pursue a career? You could even switch off after a few years. That'd be a pretty ideal life for me, I think. But again, in most marriages, both people have to work.
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2016/xv6/book-rev9.pdf
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6/xv6-rev7.pdf
The labs are very informative: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2016/labs/lab3/
I also worked through the 6.824 Distributed Systems course, which is a lot of fun:
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/
Lab 4 is fiendishly difficult, but you end up learning a lot.
Beyond all that, there's no substitute for just diving in and breaking stuff. Just go with whatever area you find the most fun. Maybe that's compiling and modifying the Linux kernel, or maybe it's tweaking a software rasterizer like https://github.com/blitzcode/rust-exp.
I got into systems programming mainly as a consequence of being a game developer -- when you write your own engines, you're forced to consider a hundred low-level details like memory layout, pipelining, threading, simulation, adding a scripting interface for your designers, cursing AMD when you run into GPU driver bugs, etc. There are a lifetime worth of interesting problems to solve in that area.