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John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

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Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#11

Post by dmurray »

scared_together wrote: post #7

What if instead of writing the entire OS, a company were to pick up an existing “hobby” OS and refine it? For example any of the systems listed in Carmack’s post. Or perhaps Serenity OS, RedoxOS, etc.

In that case, why wouldn't they "just" fork Linux? Or 10-years-ago-Linux?

The technical justification for Meta writing their own OS is that they'd get to make design decisions that suited them at a very deep level, not that they could do the work equivalent of contributing a few drivers to an existing choice.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#12

Post by armchairhacker »

What would be the real advantage of a custom OS over a Linux distribution?

The OS does process scheduling, program management, etc. Ok, you don’t want a VR headset to run certain things slowly or crash. But some Linux distributions are battle-tested and stable, and fast, so can’t you write ordinary programs that are fast and reliable (e.g. the camera movement and passthrough use RTLinux and have a failsafe that has been formally verified or extensively tested) and that’s enough?

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#13

Post by LaffertyDev »

klik99 wrote: post #6

You could write a book on why it's practically impossible to create a new OS these days. Love Carmack for stating it so clearly. I also love that called out TempleOS, I also have a weird respect for it. Plan 9 is the probably the best example of a totally new OS and I hope someday it becomes viable because it's really a joy to use. But ultimately it just makes sense to adapt existing kernels / OS (say, arch) and adap…

I would read that book.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#14

Post by doctorpangloss »

The problem with this guy is that it’s hard to criticize him, whether at work or in this forum. For example, I am going to be downvoted for mocking the fact that this guy thinks it’s some genius move to say “No” to making an operating system, whatever making an operating system means.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#15

Post by dwaltrip »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #3

> To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers. I mean, I'd give a fair shake to an OS from the SQLite team [1]. 1. https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

Where do I apply to join this monastic order of OS programmers?

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#17

Post by Skunkleton »

anthem2025 wrote: post #8

Did they have people who have built an OS before? I’ve seen this firsthand. These giant tech companies try to just jump into a massive new project thinking that because they have built such an impressive website and have so much experience at scale they should just be able to handle building a new OS. In my case it wasn’t even a new OS it was just building around an existing platform and even that was massively probl…

> Did they have people who have built an OS before?

Yes.

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#19

Post by jamboca »

armchairhacker wrote: post #12

What would be the real advantage of a custom OS over a Linux distribution? The OS does process scheduling, program management, etc. Ok, you don’t want a VR headset to run certain things slowly or crash. But some Linux distributions are battle-tested and stable, and fast, so can’t you write ordinary programs that are fast and reliable (e.g. the camera movement and passthrough use RTLinux and have a failsafe that has b…

Think you answered your own question. No real differences except more articles, $, and hype

Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

#20

Post by aPoCoMiLogin »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #9

> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.

it is madness, you would be surprised how many ppl take things too serious. been there, had talk with HR cause i've said that the solution is mediocre and we have to do something better than that.
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