Further Reading
This wiki summarizes and explains the topics it covers, but it is not a replacement for the primary specifications those explanations are based on. The sources below are where to go for register-level completeness this wiki doesn’t attempt to provide, or for community discussion when a specific implementation question comes up.
Primary specifications
Section titled “Primary specifications”- Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manuals: the authoritative reference for x86 and x86-64 instruction encoding, paging, protected and long mode, and the APIC.
- AMD64 Architecture Programmer’s Manual: the AMD-side equivalent, and the original specification of long mode, which AMD introduced.
- PCI-SIG specifications (PCI Local Bus, PCI-to-PCI Bridge, PCI Express base spec): referenced throughout PCI.
- ACPI Specification: governs the MADT, MCFG, and DSDT tables referenced across the PIC & APIC, PCI, and Physical Memory articles.
- UEFI Specification: the formal specification behind UEFI booting, GPT partitioning, and the Graphics Output Protocol.
Community references
Section titled “Community references”- OSDev Wiki (wiki.osdev.org): the long-running hobbyist wiki this project takes inspiration from, with considerably more register-level and code-sample depth on many hardware-specific topics than fits this wiki’s scope.
- OSDev Forums: the discussion forum associated with the OSDev Wiki, useful for implementation-specific questions and debugging help.
- QEMU documentation (qemu.org/docs): covers command-line flags, monitor commands, and the GDB stub referenced under Emulating & Debugging.
- GNU Binutils and GCC manuals: the reference documentation for the toolchain built under Building a Cross-Compiler.
See also
Section titled “See also”- How to Use This Wiki: this wiki’s own conventions and reading order.