Reddit mentions of Operating System Concepts, Binder Ready Version

It sounds like you want to read the famous dragon book and dinosaur book. Might as well have a read through the wizard book to finish the set. Nand2tetris also comes to mind.

I will also say that you don't need to know any of this unless it's stopping you from doing something you want to do. It's a fundamental skill of a programmer to abstract away unnecessary details, if I write a query to a server and I follow the API's specs, why do I care if it's routed through a local network, sent through the internet, flown by a carrier pigeon or conveyed by a smoke signal?

EDIT:
Let me reiterate

> you don't need to know

If you want to know, then go learn it. I never said that you shouldn't know these things.

> unless it's stopping you from doing something you want to do.

If you actually have need for it, then that's when you should learn it. I had to optimise my C++ program, so I learned about C++ compiler optimisation options, copy avoidance, cache optimisation and concurrent programming. I didn't go learn all about lexers, parsers, abstract syntax trees, grammars, assembly, processor specific instruction sets, OS thread management and a hundred other topics while my code sat there unoptimised.

We only have finite time and resource, "learn everything you can about everything" is an absurdly unrealistic piece of advice. OP is struggling to develop a mental model for allocating memory in C, learning how to build tetris from NAND level up is NOT an efficient way to accomplish this task.

No, and I'll tell you why. Arch isn't a horrid distro, I just don't like the Arch philosophy or mentality that a lot of the newbies have. People use Arch for the wrong reasons, mainly "to learn Linux", which kinds grinds my gears. Hell, I just had this talk with someone today so it's kinda fresh in my mind.

• Some people think you get a "performance" gain from switching. The only distro I know that you can get that claim is Gentoo, and it's minimal compared to the hassles inherited in getting the system up and running (last time I touched Gentoo was 2005).
  
  
• Rolling Release sounds nice until a tool that you have been using for ages goes away (ifconfig, route). I want stability and the choice to not upgrade to the latest and greatest, especially on teh server side (sarge has been keeping one of my sites up and running for ages and never had an issue)
  
  
• "Learning Linux" is misleading. I hear this a lot, and it's malarkey. Any distro can "teach you linux". Just because your installation is a hassle doesn't mean you are a good teacher. If you want to learn how a distro works, Linux From Scratch is a way better project. Other than that Learning Linux, for the average user, should be centralized to knowing your system in a high level AND understanding your CLI and Shell
  
  Also, if you want to learn OS concepts, read Operating Systems Concept by Silberschatz or Modern Operating Systems by Tanenbaum, both better sources of learning what an OS does than Arch.
  
  My final word before I get downvoted to oblivion, just because something is harder than it should be doesn't mean it's a good educational tool. If that were true, you'd be using a BSD derivative over Arch Linux.

Scheduling. It may widely vary from hypervisor to hypervisor which type of scheduling they implement, but the essence is that VM's are assigned time slices of CPU cores.

Some links regarding scheduling:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduling_(computing)

http://www.virtuallycloud9.com/index.php/2013/08/virtual-processor-scheduling-how-vmware-and-microsoft-hypervisors-work-at-the-cpu-level/

If you want to get an even better understanding of scheduling and other operating system concepts, I can highly recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Abraham-Silberschatz/dp/1118129385

The book is a bit pricey, but IMO pretty much worth it (and you could resell it after you've read it).

these will be examples / pointers. not direct "do this"es or "follow that"s. google keywords from points below.

first off id learn how to code. there are universities worth of educational content online. if you dont know how to code, id start with python. easy, simple, good scripting language. id learned it from codecademy.org back in the day. it was sufficient.

youd said you were learning linux. do that. there will be more linux to learn constantly. fiddle around. fail. figure shit out.

learn C.

you seem into networking and web stuffs. learn how computers talk to eachother. write a few clients/servers. go further and sniff the communication between them using a sniffer (wireshark maybe).

learn how to set up a network. OWN the shit out of that network, as in secure the shit out of it, be able to listen to communications, better yet, manipulate them. id even say fuck around with OpenWRT, a linux for network devices (routers, etc.). maybe set up a secondary network with an old router that you can install OpenWRT on, see if you can set it up, try to fuck with it.

set up your own web server and write a web app. in general im in favor of learning by building/doing. idk have something that works with mysql for example. see what kind of inputs become xss attacks, what kind of inputs inject sql queries, why.

learn how a computer works. learn what an operating system is, and what it does. https://www.amazon.com/Operating-System-Concepts-Abraham-Silberschatz/dp/1118129385 this is a good intro for it. why stop there, learn some good ole computer architecture, learn what a computer actually does.

(as i write this, im realizing that this looks too much like general advice for an aspiring computer engineer. so ill just go ahead and recommend you to work on being one, why not :D )

get to an okay state in knowledge about how stuff works. at that point you should learn about your arsenal. (and/or you can keep on learning). there are platforms you can practice. could set up a vulnerable vm and work on hacking into it. there are sites like smashthestack that host hacking puzzles. there should be vulnerable web apps for practicing also.

what i wrote is preeety general, but id stand by it. i dont even know what youre trying to hack, or what level of knowledge you have so there you go.

oh also GOOGLE. GOOGLE ALL DAY ERRDAY. all that above is easily googleable. figure it out.

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