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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

#151

Post by silvestrov »

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

Vendors might say that they don't have the resources (man hours) and don't want to hand over documentation to external developers.

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

#152

Post by SgtBastard »

howdyhowdy123 wrote: post #142
betaby wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because of state backing and state objectives MS is a state backed company. Very natural that China went the same path.

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.

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

#153

Post by ForHackernews »

saulpw wrote: post #85
EGreg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS isnt the hard part. The driver ecosystem is the moat. Linux finally overcame it decades later

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.

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

#154

Post by crote »

Aurornis wrote: post #136
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. See Google's Fuschia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_(operating_system) > But the long term value could potentially be astronomical. Such as what?

> Such as what?

Historically? The internet, the concept of a graphical user interface, the mouse, the smartphone, the LCD display, the laser printer...

It's about clever people trying weird stuff, and occasionally ending up with a world-changing idea. Asking for examples of to-be-discovered innovations is, by definition, an impossibility.

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

#155

Post by markus_zhang »

tanvach wrote: post #64
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 reverse engineering all the drivers is going to be a huge headache.

Sounds like super fun if I could be paid a bit for it.

What is an easy gate task to get into “reverse engineering some drivers for some OS”?

Second thought: I don’t even know how to write a driver or a kernel, so I better start from there.

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

#156

Post by pinoy420 »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #139
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…

Masters of doom portrays carmack as a total dictator of a boss. Doom Guy by John Romero seems to back this up

[dead]

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

#157

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#158

Post by wmf »

markus_zhang wrote: post #155
tanvach wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah reverse engineering all the drivers is going to be a huge headache.

Sounds like super fun if I could be paid a bit for it. What is an easy gate task to get into “reverse engineering some drivers for some OS”? Second thought: I don’t even know how to write a driver or a kernel, so I better start from there.

Asahi Linux.

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

#159

Post by sour-taste »

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.

* The vast majority aren't compiled into any given kernel

* Those that are are only loaded when needed

It's not that bad

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

#160

Post by sesm »

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…

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.
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