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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

#121

Post by rwmj »

b112 wrote: post #117
rwmj wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's just that it was so obviously going to fail, because there's no mass market for a product that you have to strap onto your face. You didn't need to spend billions to learn that.

If they'd spent the money researching nuclear fusion or space flight or a new way to develop microprocessors, I would be cheering their efforts even if they had failed in the end.

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

#122

Post by modeless »

tanvach wrote: post #16

I think people have forgotten about Google Fuchsia which I guess is a good sign for a new OS. They’ve done quite well in deploying it seamlessly to their consumer devices.

"Quite well" by what metric? It shipped on one device. That's pretty much the lowest bar you can imagine! Did it provide any tangible benefit to anyone? Let alone a benefit commensurate with the enormous cost of developing it and continuing to maintain it?

I think it was insane to start a new OS effort written in C/C++. We have plenty of OSes written in C/C++! We know how that story ends. If you're going to spend the effort, at least try a new language that could enable a better security model.

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

#123

Post by qiine »

GeekyBear wrote: post #22

My objection is that there is no universe in which Meta can be trusted with direct access to your raw gaze tracking data. The only thing I can imagine that would be more invasive would require a brain implant.

sadly they are working on it

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

#124

Post by scrlk »

danielodievich wrote: post #120

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 someth…

Was it Singularity?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...

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

#125

Post by gmueckl »

mbac32768 wrote: post #111
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 o…

I also think that they have access to more helpful resources than people outside the field do, e.g. being able to contact people working on the lower layers to get the missing info. These channels exist in the professional world, but they are hard to access.

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

#126

Post by CamperBob2 »

lukev wrote: post #41

This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument. But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional. But the long term value could potentia…

But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative.

They have; Taligent comes to mind. You may not have heard of that -- or more likely, you have but just forgot about it -- but it's a good object lesson (no pun intended) in why a successful new OS is hard to just conjure into existence. There has to be a crying, desperate need for it, not just a vague sense that This Time We'll Get It Right.

You could probably cite OS/2 Warp as a less-obscure example of the same phenomenon.

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

#127

Post by Keyframe »

lukev wrote: post #41

This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument. But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional. But the long term value could potentia…

While I appreciate Carmack and all, I'd love to hear from someone like Dave Cutler who's been over that bridge at least a couple of times successfully about if and what he'd do if he had resources to create whatever the hell he wants.

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

#128

Post by twelvedogs »

lukev wrote: post #41

This is completely right from a product point of view, which is Carmack's argument. But I have wondered why one of these companies with billions of dollars to burn hasn't tried to create something new as a strategic initiative. Yes, there wouldn't be any ROI for years, and yes, the first several products on the platform would probably be better off on something more traditional. But the long term value could potentia…

How would that be better than just grabbing a bsd and starting with that, PlayStation and Apple did it and actually ended up with functional products

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

#129

Post by mikepurvis »

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…

I think the proper comparison point here is probably what game consoles have done since the Xbox 360, which is basically run a hypervisor on the metal with the app/game and management planes in separate VMs. That gives the game a bare metal-ish experience and doesn't throw away resources on true multitasking where it isn't really needed. At the same time it still lets the console run a dashboard plus background tasks like downloading and so on.

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

#130

Post by gmueckl »

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 physical health impacts on people.
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