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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

#201

Post by WD-42 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #195
WD-42 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! It seems very narc-y. Just let me build my cool waste of company resources, it's not like Zucky is going to notice, he's too busy building his 11 homes. Imagine being able to build an operating system, basically the end-game of being a programmer, and get PAID for it. Then some nerd tells on you.

I'm not sure if you are trying to be /s, but yeah that's basically what I'm trying to say. Definitely better than working on those recommendation systems. Damn, I'd pay to work in some serious OS/Compiler teams, but hey why should they hire me? Oh well...Yeah I'm doing a bit of projects on my side but man I'm so burnt out by my 9am-5pm $$ job + 5pm-10pm kid job that I barely have any large chunk of time to work on th…

Not sarcastic at all. I'm in the same boat. I've been trying to get into contributing to Redox, but at the end of the work day when the kid is finally asleep it's hard to motivate.

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

#202

Post by jamra »

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 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.

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

#203

Post by toast0 »

sitkack wrote: post #186
toast0 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are kinda wasting your time, the only way to make it work is to make the hobby OS Linux. Not the parent, but of course they're wasting their time... That's the point of a hobby OS. I'm working on a hobby OS, and I have no illusions that it's most likely fewer than 10 people will ever run it, and less than 100 will hear about it, but it lets me explore some interesting (to me) ideas, and forces me to learn a lit…

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 waste of time, yes? Why not waste time on the part that's engaging?

> The biggest scam in the OS world is drivers, we should demand more out of our hardware. Drivers shouldn't be necessary.

I can't even fathom what you mean here? You've got to have some interface to communicate with hardware. That's a driver. Some hardware only needs a very small driver... Tell the hardware where to send input, how to notify when input is ready and when its ready for output, and tell the hardware where data to output is. Maybe some setup stuff for modes and whatever if the needs aren't obvious and universal. I don't see how you could possibly avoid that.

It would certainly be possible for more devices to use common interfaces so a single driver could operate many different devices. Maybe that's what you mean? There's some movement towards that... SATA controllers generally speak AHCI, human interface devices generally appear as USB HID devices, etc. NICs tend to have a wide variety of setup sequences, but data queues usually fit into one of a limited number of patterns.

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

#204

Post by ch4s3 »

nine_k wrote: post #5
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #2

I like that the top reply to Carmack's wall of text is a screenshot of TempleOS with a doodle of an elephant lmao. And ironically, that meme reply is on topic and it says a thousand words with just one photo. Another point I would add in support of that meme comment, is Google's recent rug-pull of Android not allowing sideloading apps from unsigned developers anymore starting this autumn, after over a decade of conqu…

In other words, unless God has specifically called upon you to build an OS, and maybe provided divine inspiration and assistance, you should avoid doing that. Seems to support Carmack's point!

Unless its for love or devotion, there's no compelling reason to create a new OS in 2025. Certainly that could change in the future but I think his observation (if I understand him correctly) is correct.

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

#205

Post by toast0 »

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.

I don't know how you get paid for it, but if you want to write your own kernel, I'd start with an osdev tutorial. started with this one [1], but this one [2] has a promissing name... and I haven't really looked around.

It helps to have a concept to guide you too, but you can certainly make some progress on the basics before you figure out what you really want to do.

[1] https://wiki.osdev.org/User:Zesterer/Bare_Bones

[2] https://osdev.wiki/wiki/Multiboot1_Bare_Bones

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

#206

Post by Fade_Dance »

jamra wrote: post #202
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 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 remember watching Carmack at a convention 15 years ago. He took a short sabbatical and came back with ID Tech 3 on an iPhone, and it still looks amazing well over a decade later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52hMWMWKAMk&t=1s

This is a guy who figures that what he wants to do most with his 3 free weekends is to port his latest, greatest engine to a Cortex-A8. Leading corporate strategy? Maybe not. But Carmack on efficiency? Just do it.

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

#207

Post by eklitzke »

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

Writing drivers is easy, getting vendors to write *correct* drivers is difficult. At work right now we are working with a Chinese OEM with a custom Wifi board with a chipset with firmware and drivers supplied by the vendor. It's actually not a new wifi chipset, they've used it in other products for years without issues. In conditions that are difficult to reproduce sometimes the chipset gets "stuck" and basically stops responding or doing any wifi things. This appears to be a firmware problem because unloading and reloading the kernel module doesn't fix the issue. We've supplied loads of pcap dumps to the vendor, but they're kind of useless to the vendor because (a) pcap can only capture what the kernel sees, not what the wifi chipset sees, (b) it's infeasible for the wifi chipset to log all its internal state and whatnot, and (c) even if this was all possible trying to debug the driver just from looking at gigabytes of low level protocol dumps would be impossible.

Realistically for the OEM to debug the issue they're going to need a way to reliably repro which we don't have for them, so we're kind of stuck.

This type of problem generalizes to the development of drivers and firmware for many complex pieces of modern hardware.

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

#208

Post by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u »

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.

I sympathize, but the reality is that except for very specialized cases, (hyper) optimizing for CPU performance is unnecessary, even in the embedded space. A Cortex-M0 has roughly the same performance as a 486, and is cheap and power efficient enough to be bundled in disposable test kits, vapes, etc.

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

#209

Post by toast0 »

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…

To clarify, are you having trouble getting the signal to reboot from the gcp console into your OS? Or are you having trouble rebooting on gcp?

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

#210

Post by qaq »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #84
Inityx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer a different interpretation: If a professional can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others, then they need to improve their communication skills.

Having worked in the valley, I've seen what critical feedback meant in many companies there, and it removes all usefulness of the info because there is a ceiling of what is socially acceptable to say; therefore, you can't know how bad or urgent things are. Everything is ASAP. They are super excited about everything. And nothing you do is wrong, it just could be improved or they like it but don't love it. You don't kn…

I am with you on this. Worked in our Dublin office was so refreshing to have straight up communication vs whatever the song and dance we do here in US.
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