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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

#261

Post by dedup-com »

gafferongames wrote: post #252
alanbernstein wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmack's swim lane was exceptionally wide. My understanding was that this sort of criticism was actually his main job duty.

Imagine being a meta engineer and not taking Carmack's advice seriously. Why the fuck is he even hired there if you are not going to listen to him. Dude has forgotten more things about game development than you will ever know...

There were quite a few of high-caliber individuals with equally impressive resumes in the organization to match Carmack's wisdom and ego.

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

#262

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dmazzoni wrote: post #236

I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia. They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with. They had a huge team. Hundreds of people. It was so ambitious. But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it. Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan. If they wanted to build a…

Not only did they target Home Hub, they basically forced a rewrite on it (us, I worked on the team). After we already launched. And made our existing workable software stack into legacy. And then they were late. Then late again. And late again. With no consequences.

100% agree with your points. To me watching I was like -- yeah, hell, yeah, working on an OS from scratch sounds awesome, those guys have an awesome job. Too bad they're making everyone else's job suck.

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

#263

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

makeitdouble wrote: post #199
b112 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern hardware is just so complicated it would take a long time to completely document, and even longer to write a driver for. That's what's claimed. That's what people say, yet it's just an excuse. I've heard the same sort of excuse people have, after they write a massive codebase, then say "Oops, sorry, didn't get around to documenting it". And no, hardware is not more difficult than software to document. If the s…

> "Oops, sorry, didn't get around to documenting it". That's obviously the wrong message. They should say "Go ask the engineering VP to get us off any other projects for another cycle while we're writing 'satisfying' documentation". Extensive documentation comes at a price few companies are willing to pay (and that's not just a matter of resources. Look at Apple's documentation)

I write documentation as I'm writing the code. In my opinion, the code is only as good as its documentation -- they're two parts of the same thing. It's mostly comments at the top of files, and sometimes a markdown file in the same directory.

This way, good documentation is priced into my estimate for the project. I don't have a work item "spend a few days documenting." Nope, if I'm doing a foo then that includes documenting a foo at the same time.

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

#264

Post by dedup-com »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #194
zoeysmithe wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And stupid. Like it or hate it, a non-nonsense, direct speaking, but fair and objective boss is the one you want. No one is served by failure; not the people at the top, nor the people at the bottom. There is a difference between “this project is not going to work” vs “these people are incompetent and the project should be cancelled as a result”. The former needs to be said, the latter is a HR violation.

Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent". What he said boils down to "these people are world's best experts on writing operating systems and they'd love to write a new one from the scratch but I strongly believe that writing a new operating system is not the best path forward."

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

#266

Post by dmitrygr »

markus_zhang wrote: post #161
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.

Yup. This is how bloat is created.

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

#267

Post by andreww591 »

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.…

At least for certain types of OSes, it should be relatively easy to get most of Linux's hardware support by porting LKL (https://github.com/lkl/linux) and adding appropriate hooks to access hardware.

Of course, your custom kernel will still have to have some of its own code to support core platform/chipset devices, but LKL should pretty much cover just about all I/O devices (and you also get stuff like disk filesystems and a network stack along with the device drivers).

Also, it probably wouldn't work so well for typical monolithic kernels, but it should work decently on something that has user-mode driver support.

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

#268

Post by dedup-com »

boredatoms wrote: post #109
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

XROS had a completely new and rapidly evolving system call surface. No vendor would've been able to even start working on a driver for their device, let alone hand off a stable, complete result. It wasn't a case of "just rename a few symbols in a FreeBSD implementation and run a bunch of tests".

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

#269

Post by WD-42 »

dedup-com wrote: post #259
WD-42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes sense when you are one of 3 developers at ID software. There's absolutely no room for waste. This is Meta. Let the kids build their operating system ffs. Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

There were almost no kids on the XROS team. The bulk of the team were E6s with graying hairs, multiple kids, and very impressive history of work on other well-known operating systems -- and most of them wrote a lot of code. This was the senior-est team I ever was a member of. Also, the most enjoyable interview process I've ever been through, no bullshit whatsoever and a rare case that I actually had to implement the…

That’s what I’m saying. It sounds like a dream job. Like you said it’s a journey not a destination, but it’s also a journey on one of the wealthiest companies in the worlds dime, so it’s kinda lame when someone calls it out for being suboptimal. That’s why I said who cares. It’s not going to hurt meta in the long run.

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

#270

Post by beeflet »

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.

Most of it is in modules that don't have to be compiled at all (and usually aren't)
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