How to understand how windows operating systems are arranged?

Question

Windows

Recommend books, websites, or ways to get a deep understanding of the windows operating system. I want to have (albeit not a clear) idea of ​​​​how this operating system works from the lowest levels. I want to finally understand what a registry is. In general, give a starting point and a development vector.
Ps I also ask you to express your opinion on this issue and those who do not understand this issue at the proper level, but who have something to say. Your opinion is also interesting. Thank you.

Answer 1

Start here www.intuit.ru/studies/courses/10471/1078/info

Answer 2

Windows is a proprietary (closed) operating system, so there is no open documentation of how it works internally.
There is general information, there is documentation about the open API for developers under Windows.
There are separate descriptions of the work of different subsystems, but again, not from the inside.
The registry is nowhere simpler, just a hierarchical set of data in the form of key=value, which is used to centrally store various data. The list of everything that is in the registry was not documented, there are known keys, there are all the rest.
The registry is used as a place to store various settings and data for both the system itself and applications. There are pros and cons of storing data in the registry or in a file.
To learn how windows works very deeply from the inside, there are two ways - to become a megahacker, an expert in reverse engineering, or to get a job at Microsoft to write the system kernel. But it will take years, so don't ask questions on the toaster that can't be answered easily. Refine slowly.
The basics of multitasking, ntfs and access rights, versioning and type of Windows systems can be read even on Wikipedia.

Answer 3

You can start by looking for leaked sources of Win2000, it is similar to XP.
All in all, it's a job for a lifetime. It is not so easy to study the result of the work of thousands of programmers.

Answer 4

Tanenbaum, Modern operating systems
Russinovich, Solomon. Windows internals, 2 volumes

Answer 5

I didn’t read special books on the topic because all this is not so necessary, I just worked with those levels that have open APIs (first WinAPI, then deeper - WinDDK (NT)), and was engaged in reverse engineering and detailed analysis of even what is open, therefore there is knowledge, and they are correct, and the authors of books can easily take them from each other or from somewhere else without even understanding the meaning, an example of this is for example the JVM or CLR (.NET), literally in every book it is written that the bytecode is not interpreted, but compiles to machine code (JIT) but none of them has evidence in the form of research results such as parsing the source code of the JVM, Mono or a screenshot from the disassembler, debugger, moreover, most of the authors of this judgment are simply not able to explore the JVM or CLR, well, let it be pure true, but it's not so interesting, it's stupid to believe in some kind of dogma.

Answer 6

How Windows works - only M$ knows. Why? Because the sources are closed. There is, of course, documentation, there is an API for developers, which says how to get the result Y by calling function X. But how function Y itself works is nowhere said and cannot be said. Because nizya - source codes are the property of M$.
At different times, various "Windows unleashed", "Windows inside" and so on were released, but all of its inside consisted of a more detailed description of the settings - there is no exact, detailed, detailed description of the internal structure and interaction of components anywhere except in the M$ internal network. As well as there is no detailed description of the registry (registry).
Algorithmically, the registry is a tree-like database - a special case of a graph. Some keys have values, some don't. This database is designed to store program settings, it does not have any mandatory structure, although it has typical trees formed by the OS itself. There is no documentation on the contents of the registry, each author uses it as he sees fit and, as a rule, does not consider it necessary to document it at all. All books like "Secrets of the Windows Registry" are simply collections of what UNIX calls howtos - examples taken from practice.
If you really want to do this, then be prepared for the fact that this is a very slow process. First, you can study everything that is in the public domain - all these Windows unleashed and Registry inside, then documentation for developers, forums - you can catch some pieces there.

Answer 7

> I want to finally understand what a registry is.
The registry is like a notepad in your pocket - Windows (and software) stores everything that cannot be forgotten :)