Wow, very informative - even if I struggled along at some points and had to look up definitions :D
For someone who last dabbled in assembly just a bit on a Tandy 8086 eight or nine years ago, what's the best way to start clean and get a fresh understanding of x86_64 architecture? What are good beginner projects? I assume no one's building a blog application out of assembly, so what's the equivalent?
I think the way most people get started is to build simple C programs, and then use objdump to try and understand the output of the compiler (use -O0, of course =)
The intel CPU manuals have a lot of the low-level systems information about the CPU (like virtual memory, interrupts/exceptions, etc). If you enjoy/don't mind reading that type of technical documentation, you should start there.
For someone who last dabbled in assembly just a bit on a Tandy 8086 eight or nine years ago, what's the best way to start clean and get a fresh understanding of x86_64 architecture? What are good beginner projects? I assume no one's building a blog application out of assembly, so what's the equivalent?
Looking forward to struggling through part two!