What worked for me is trying to develop my own kernel. This might be too low-level for you, but it helps immensely to dispel the magic around how code gets exec

What worked for me is trying to develop my own kernel. This might be too low-level for you, but it helps immensely to dispel the magic around how code gets executed by the CPU and the OS. You'll learn how the OS achieves protection from user programs, what are interrupts and how does the OS handle them, what are processes and threads and how does the OS schedule their execution, how virtual memory works (segmentation/paging), how the program is laid out in memory (code, data, heap, stack), how runtimes like the C runtime manages memory and links your code to OS syscalls, how dynamic linking works, what is an ABI, what is a calling convention, how does the compiler, the linker, and the OS know what each should do? How memory mapped file access works, etc. I can keep going, but you get the picture. From there, you'll know where to go next based on what you've learned so far. My recommended reading list is: [1] Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP [2] Intel Software Developer Manuals (especially volume 1 and 3A) https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/intel-sdm.html https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/article... [3] OSDev wiki https://wiki.osdev.org https://wiki.osdev.org