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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

#161

Post by markus_zhang »

Aurornis wrote: post #133

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind. It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack. I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworker…

I have mixed feelings about this. In one part, JC is someone I look up to, at least from the perspective of engineering. On the other hand, putting myself in the shoes in someone who got the once in life chance to build a new OS with corp support for a new shiny device…I for hell would want to do this.

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

#162

Post by wmf »

ForHackernews wrote: post #153
saulpw wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What an inefficient disaster to carry around all those drivers to run hardware that isn't on the device you're running on.

It's modular so you don't have to compile drivers you don't need.

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

#163

Post by cma »

sesm wrote: post #160
gmueckl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters who you communicate concerns to. Something as fundamental as "I think that your team shouldn't even exist" should go to the team leads and their managers exclusively at first. Writing that to the entire affected team is counterproductive in any organization because it unnecessarily raises anxiety and reduces team productivity and focus. Comments like this from influential people can have big mental and phy…

This entire situation looks very suspicious. Was Carmack even responsible for triaging research projects and allocating resources for them? If yes, then he should have fought that battle earlier. If no, then the best he could do is to refuse to use that OS in projects he controls.

It should be fine to give your opinion on efforts.

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

#164

Post by const_cast »

jamboca wrote: post #19
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

And, let's be real here: engineering prestige.

Everyone wants to make an OS because that's super cool and technical and hard. I mean, that's just resume gold.

Using Linux is boring and easy. Yawwwwn. But nobody makes an OS from scratch, only crazy greybeard developers do that!

The problem is, you're not crazy greybeard developers working out of your basement for the advancement of humanity. No. Youre paid employees of a mega corporation. You have no principles, no vision. You're not Linus Trovalds.

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

#165

Post by zoeysmithe »

Aurornis wrote: post #133

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind. It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack. I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworker…

Sorry but if you know his story, seen candid videos of him, or talked to the people around him, he's a Linus-level "I'll say what I want" type.

There weird hagiographies need to go. Carmack is absolutely not known to be kind. I have no idea what happened here but the idea that's he's this kindly old grandpa who could never, ever be rude or unprofessional is really out there.

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

#166

Post by mook »

Nuthen wrote: post #58
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…

Based on the latter tweet in the chain, I'm wondering if Carmack is hinting that Foveated Rendering (more processing power is diverted towards the specific part of the screen you're looking at) was one advantage envisioned for it. But perhaps he's saying that he's not so sure if the performance gains from it actually justify building a custom OS instead of just overclocking the GPU along with an existing OS?

Wouldn't that be an application (or at most system library) concern though? The OS is just there to sling pixels, it wouldn't have any idea whether those pixels are blurry… well for VR it would all be OpenGL or equivalent so the OS just did hardware access permissions.

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

#167

Post by 1718627440 »

gmueckl wrote: post #130
labrador wrote: post #43

> my old internal posts... got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad That jives with my sense that META is a mediocre company

It matters who you communicate concerns to. Something as fundamental as "I think that your team shouldn't even exist" should go to the team leads and their managers exclusively at first. Writing that to the entire affected team is counterproductive in any organization because it unnecessarily raises anxiety and reduces team productivity and focus. Comments like this from influential people can have big mental and phy…

Not when this is his personal opinion he thought nothing should follow from.

"I think that your team shouldn't even exist" doesn't mean "I want your team to no longer exist.".

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

#168

Post by toast0 »

sitkack wrote: post #145
mbac32768 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this. I tried to modify a hobby OS recently so it would process the "soft reboot" button (to speed up being rebooted in GCP) and it was so unbelievably hard to figure out how to support it. I tried following the instructions on the OS Dev Wiki and straight up reading what both Linux and FreeBSD do and still couldn't make progress. Yes. The thing that happens when you tell Windows or Linux to "restart". Gave up o…

The VMM on GCP has only really been tested with Linux. You are kinda wasting your time, the only way to make it work is to make the hobby OS Linux.

> You are kinda wasting your time, the only way to make it work is to make the hobby OS Linux.

Not the parent, but of course they're wasting their time... That's the point of a hobby OS.

I'm working on a hobby OS, and I have no illusions that it's most likely fewer than 10 people will ever run it, and less than 100 will hear about it, but it lets me explore some interesting (to me) ideas, and forces me to learn a little more about random pieces of computing. If I ran on GCP, I'd want the reboot button to work. That sounds useful.

On the topic, I don't see why anyone would want to build a general purpose OS. There's enough already and even with the shrinking of hardware variety, there's a lot of stuff to support to make a general purpose OS work on enough hardware for people to consider using it. You can take Linux or a BSD and hack it up pretty good to explore a lot of OS ideas. Chances are you're going to borrow some of their drivers anyway, and then you'll end up with at least some similarity... may as well start there and save a lot of time. (My hobby OS has a custom kernel and custom drivers, but I only support a bare minimum of devices... (pc) console i/o, one real NIC, and virtio-net... that's all I need; I might add support for more NICs and more consoles later)

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

#169

Post by const_cast »

ronsor wrote: post #112
agsnu wrote: post #99

Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.

You're downvoted but you're 100% correct.

It makes absolutely zero financial sense to create a new general purpose operating system.

That's billions of lines of code. With a B. And that's just the code - getting it to work with hardware?

Do YOU want to talk to 10,000 hardware vendors and get them on board? No! Nobody does! That's just money burning!

But, there are valid political reasons for creating a new general purpose OS.

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

#170

Post by theshackleford »

Aurornis wrote: post #133

> They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind. It's depressing to imagine HR getting involved because someone's feelings had been hurt by an objective discussion from a person like John Carmack. I'm having flashbacks to the times in my career when coworker…

> I've only seen John Carmack's public interactions, but they've all been professional and kind.

You don't know someone or how they really behave because they are a public figure.

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