Motherboard Chipsets and the Memory Map

I’m going to write a few posts about computer internals with the goal of explaining how modern kernels work. I hope to make them useful to enthusiasts and programmers who are interested in this stuff but don’t have experience with it. The focus is on Linux, Windows, and Intel processors. Internals are a hobby for me, I have written a fair bit of kernel-mode code but haven’t done so in a while. This first post describes the layout of modern Intel-based motherboards, how the CPU accesses memory and the system memory map.