s3micolon0

I am a software engineer by passion. I love computers, I am curious. I love to learn new things / concepts. I love to see the beauty in existing concepts being applied in completely unexpected ways, which makes you wonder that every boring thing has myriad of variations which are not obvious.

Through my college education & industry experience & curiosity, I have learned a lot. But, even after trying to search about books on the philosophy of engineering or the art / craft of engineering - I have fallen short.

I would love to hear what books / and projects that you have seen that have inspired you as an engineer & have provided you with your own philosophy of engineering.

I am talking about general "engineering" here, not just specifically "software engineering".

Requesting the universe to enlighten me :)

I have been reading about computer architecture and device drives and it is very fascinating on how a processor functions and how are operating systems created to abstract the low level details of the CPU. I was able to understand about the processor, memory and basic devices (like the Hard Disk and Display) using the Writing a simple operating system from scratch book (https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~exr/lectures/opsys/10_11/lectures/os-dev.pdf) shared recently on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30800715). Understanding this provides a good grasp of the fundamentals of the hardware and software.

But, even after this, I am not really sure on an Operating System can support such a massive number of devices, that just simply work on plug and play basis. If feels like magic. I understand that the operating system has in build drivers to a lot of these devices, but still don't understand how are such a massive number of devices covered using just by the inbuild drivers. Also, how does this related to PCI Express and other kinds of busses ? What there the generic interfaces which enable such massive number of devices to be able to work with the operating system ?

Does anyone have any good resources for explaining this from first principles, for eg. How would one go about designing a system that can work with so many devices out of the box at runtime ? It'll be really great is anyone has analogies for understanding the various parts involved in such a system.

Thank you!