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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

#111

Post by mbac32768 »

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.…

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 on this after spending days on it.

The people who develop OSes are cut from a different cloth and are not under the usual economic pressures.

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

#112

Post by ronsor »

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.

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

#113

Post by rwmj »

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

But is that a good use of Meta's money? Compared to making a few patches to Linux to fix any performance problems they find.

(And I feel bad saying this since Meta obviously did waste eleventy billion on their ridiculous Second Life recreation project ...)

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

#114

Post by b112 »

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.…

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 system is complex, there's more need to document, just as with a huge codebase. On their end, they have new employees to train up, and they have to manage testing. So any excuse that silicon vendors have to deal with such immense complexity? My violin plays for them.

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

#115

Post by jambutters »

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...

They actually reuse Linux driver stack for hardware compatibility

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by b112 »

rwmj wrote: post #113
boredatoms wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But is that a good use of Meta's money? Compared to making a few patches to Linux to fix any performance problems they find. (And I feel bad saying this since Meta obviously did waste eleventy billion on their ridiculous Second Life recreation project ...)

I don't like Meta, but there used to be a time where big corp used to spend 30% of its budget on R&D. It's how we got all the toys we have now, R&D labs of big Bell and others.

So please don't mock the spend. Big spends fail sometimes, and at least people were paid to do the work.

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

#118

Post by busymom0 »

> I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad, but I expect many of them would acknowledge in hindsight that the Meta products would not be in a better place today if the new OS effort had been rammed into them.

So someone at Meta was so sensitive that being told their behemoth of a project was ill advised ended up getting reported to HR?

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

#119

Post by betaby »

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.

> because of state backing and state objectives

MS is a state backed company. Very natural that China went the same path.

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

#120

Post by danielodievich »

Back in mmm like 2002 or 2003 or 2004 while at Microsoft I read an internal paper from a few OS guys who hackathoned something for Bill Gates's Think Week (which is when he used to go to some island in San Juans or somewhere similar and just read curated papers and think, it was a huge prestige to get such a paper to him) and that something was an OS written from scratch with GC and memory management on top of something very .NET framework'y (which was released a couple of years ago. They had it booting on all kinds of hardware and doing various neato things. One of explicitly called design principles was 0 compatibility with anything Windows before. Which is why it didn't go anywhere I assume. I remember it was just a handful of engineers (presumably OS folks) hacking for like a month. . It was awesome to read about.
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