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.
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.