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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

#271

Post by dedup-com »

tanvach wrote: post #35

Was at Oculus post acquisition and can say that the whole XROS was an annoyance and distraction the core technology teams didn’t need. There were so many issues with multiple tech stacks that needed fixing first. Mind you, this XROS idea came after Oculus reorged into FB proper. It felt to me like there were FB teams (or individuals) that wanted get on the ARVR train. Carmack was absolutely right, and after the reorg…

Just a small bunch of XROS people came from FB proper (mostly managers) because an average FB SWE has no required skills. Most folks were hired from the industry at E5/E6 and I think we had ever took one or two bootcampers that ultimately were not successful and quickly moved elsewhere in FB.

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

#272

Post by ignoramous »

influx wrote: post #227
jamra wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed his posts internally before he left. He was strict about resource waste. Hand tracking would break constantly and he brought metrics to his posts. His whole point was that Apple has hardware nailed down and it’ll be efficient software that will be the differentiator. The bloat at Meta was the result of empire building.

I followed his posts internally too. It's amazing how many people were arguing against fucking John Carmack. What a waste of talent.

> were arguing against fucking John Carmack

I am sure Carmack himself encourages debates and discussions. Lionizing one person can't be expected of every employee (unless that person is also the founder or the company is tiny).

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

#273

Post by leoc »

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.…

My hunch is that for nearly anyone who is serious about it these days, the way forward is either to have unusually tight control over the underlying platform, or to include a servant Linux installation with your OS. If Windows is a buggy set of device drivers, then Linux is a free set of buggy device drivers. If you're happy with your OS running as a client of a Linux hypervisor indefinitely then you could go for that; otherwise you'd have to try to gradually move bits of the hardware support into your OS over time—ideally faster than new Linux dependencies arise...

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

#274

Post by foxglacier »

toast0 wrote: post #203
sitkack wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say they were wasting their time on their hobby OS, they are wasting their time trying to get it to do very esoteric thing on GCP. They aren't trying to get reboot to work, they are trying to get their version of kexec to work so their hobby os reboots faster. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kexec The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be ne…

They said they wanted the soft reboot button to work. I assumed they meant catching the button press, which having seen some of this stuff is probably very tricky. I don't see why a kexec alike wouldn't work about the same on GCP vs qemu vs bare metal... Or what that has to do with a GCP soft reboot button (which again, I think is referring to the reboot button in the GCP console) Either way, the whole thing is a was…

> Tell the hardware where to send input, ...

I agree you need a driver but for most hardware, that should be pretty simple, and easily documented by the hardware vendor, shouldn't it? A button has to be about the simplest possible I/O device imaginable.

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

#275

Post by daseiner1 »

dagmx wrote: post #187
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…

John can be quite blunt and harsh in person, from everyone I know who’s interacted with him. If he doesn’t believe in something, he can sometimes be over critical and it’s hard to push back in that kind of power imbalance.

[flagged]

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

#276

Post by snickerbockers »

andreww591 wrote: post #267
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 filesys…

>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).

thus calling into question why you ever bothered writing a new kernel in the first place if you were just going to piggyback Linux's device drivers onto some userspace wrapper thingy.

Im not necessarily indoctrinated to the point where I can't conceive of Linux being suboptimal in a way which is so fundamental that it requires no less than a completely new OS from scratch but you're never going to get there off of recycling linux's device drivers because that forces you to design your new OS as a linux clone in which cade you definitely did not need to write an entire new kernel from scratch.

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

#277

Post by os2warpman »

SgtBastard wrote: post #152
howdyhowdy123 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't

Technically you are correct but the commenter you’re responding to means that with the amount of Western Governments spend on MS products and services, the are a d facto (if not de jure) state backed enterprise.

US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity.

In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue.

I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue.

Federal Spending: https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/dd77b7c3-663e-cb91-229...

Microsoft Annual Revenue: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/index.html

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

#278

Post by dedup-com »

WD-42 wrote: post #269
dedup-com wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe the suboptimality concern was more about time to market and innovation velocity, and less about money. At the time FB felt a real sense of urgency given the anticipated AR/VR explosion (in a good sense) and presence of competitors in the space, both real and imaginary.

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

#279

Post by toast0 »

foxglacier wrote: post #274
toast0 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said they wanted the soft reboot button to work. I assumed they meant catching the button press, which having seen some of this stuff is probably very tricky. I don't see why a kexec alike wouldn't work about the same on GCP vs qemu vs bare metal... Or what that has to do with a GCP soft reboot button (which again, I think is referring to the reboot button in the GCP console) Either way, the whole thing is a was…

> Tell the hardware where to send input, ... I agree you need a driver but for most hardware, that should be pretty simple, and easily documented by the hardware vendor, shouldn't it? A button has to be about the simplest possible I/O device imaginable.

Yeah, problem is it's likely an acpi button, which ties you into all the fun of that.

Of course, ACPI is supposed to make interfacing with lots of similar things easier, kind of, so there you go.

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

#280

Post by chem83 »

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…

This is what got Lucovsky pushed out. He wanted to build OS from scratch and couldn't see past the technical argument and acknowledge the Product's team urgency to actually land something in the hands of customers. Meanwhile, he left a trail of toxicity that he doesn't even realize was there[0].

Interestingly, he was pulling the same bs at Google until reason prevailed and he got pushed out (but allowed to save face and claim he resigned willingly[1]).

[0] https://x.com/yewnyx/status/1793684535307284948 [1] https://x.com/marklucovsky/status/1678465552988381185

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