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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

#101

Post by numpad0 »

Is the difficulty in theoretical complexity of operating systems, or in project scoping/scope creep?

It's probably not that hard to write bare metal code for a modern CPU that runs and crashes. It's obviously insurmountably hard to compete with Android in features with scratch built bare metal code. An "OS" can be anything between the two. But it's very easy to imagine an "XR OS" project snowballing quickly into the latter, and Carmack's concerns would be spot on(as always is, and as proven). Is it then an inherent difficulty in "designing a new operating system", or is it technically something else?

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

#102

Post by geodel »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #14

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.

You can prove him wrong by doing thing what he claims should not be done.

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

#103

Post by wredcoll »

cubefox wrote: post #49
thrance wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though. The GitHub repo was never updated once. Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident.

> The GitHub repo was never updated once. Pretty sure that's false: I remember seeing the recent commit that made Grok misbehave. > Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident. Go to Bluesky and count far left posts. The result will be similar, because political bubbles form by themselves.

This attempted equivalence is wild. I'm not sure if you're uninformed or malicious, but "far right posts" means posts talking about "the jews taking over" or some other racist drivel and discussing which minority to attack next.

"Far left posts" are like, what, people should have access to healthcare? People should pay more taxes?

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

#104

Post by saubeidl »

worthless-trash wrote: post #34
ypeterholmes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Thats how conservatives feel on many other online platforms with far left views.

Which big platform has far left views?

I'm not familiar of any platform that calls for collective ownership of the means of production, land redistribution and other far left positions.

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

#106

Post by cjbgkagh »

amarant wrote: post #97
Inityx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer a different interpretation: If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.

This is not that though. This is just developers being unable to handle constructive criticism, and when they can't win the argument on merits, went for the HR option. It happens. I've had it happen to me too, but my response was to resign on the spot (I was already not satisfied with the company). The "toxic behaviour" I had done? I reverted a commit on the master branch that didn't compile, and sent a slack to the…

When I started breaking the build would end up with the person who did it having to wear the dunce hat for the day. This was before git so there are now fewer excuses for breaking the build today.

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

#107

Post by ronsor »

gorset wrote: post #87

Mechanisms for getting the linux kernel out of the way is pretty decent these days, and CPUs with a lot of cores are common. That means you can isolate a bunch of cores and pin threads the way you want, and then use some kernel-bypass to access hardware directly. Communicate between cores using ring buffers. This gives you best of both worlds - carefully designed system for the hardware with near optimal performance,…

> use some kernel-bypass to access hardware directly

You can always mmap /dev/mem to get at physical memory.

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

#108

Post by bri3d »

EGreg wrote: post #65
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…

OS isnt the hard part. The driver ecosystem is the moat. Linux finally overcame it decades later

Android built a new, giant moat for Linux (or "Linux" depending on your opinions about Android) in the embedded application processor space - now the "standard" board support package target for new embedded AP hardware is almost always some random point-in-time snapshot of Android. Running "mainline" Linux is hard (because the GPU and media peripheral drivers are usually half-userspace Android flavored stuff and rely on ION and other Androidisms) and bare-metal is even worse (where previously, you'd get register-level documentation, now, you get some Android libXYZ.so library).

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

#109

Post by boredatoms »

jnwatson wrote: post #23

I've written a lot of low level software, BSPs, and most of an OS, and the main reason to not write your own OS these days is silicon vendors. Back in the day, they would provide you a spec detailed enough that you could feasibly write your own drivers. These days, you get a medium-level description and a Linux driver of questionable quality. Part of this is just laziness, but mostly this is a function of complexity.…

Presumably if you’re meta you could pay the vendors enough to write drivers for any arbitrary OS

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

#110

Post by CodeArtisan »

saulpw wrote: post #85
EGreg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS isnt the hard part. The driver ecosystem is the moat. Linux finally overcame it decades later

Yeah, the Linux kernel has ~12m lines of code. <1m are the core, the rest are drivers.

29 Millions according to https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-AMDGPU-Driver-Size

5 Millions alone for the AMD graphic driver.

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