Comment by irundebian
8 years ago
The best start would be to read a book about operating systems such as Tanenbaums. Reading the source of an OS has a really really low signal to noise ratio in getting important knowledge about operating systems due to implementation details an OS-specific peculiarities.
What about MINIX? Being a teaching operating system, do you think it may contain less nose and thus be more useful as reading material? (I mean, without the book)
Linus Torvalds started out studying MINIX. He was a Finnish programmer into working on kernels. He ended up completing one.