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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

#371

Post by auggierose »

rainyrockies wrote: post #315
thepryz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see that. Sadly, there are a lot of people in the world who simply don't know how to deal with people who can be direct, if not somewhat abrasive, in their communication style. Their intent can be noble, well-intentioned, and not meant to offend. They simply don't beat around the bush or worry about whether your fragile ego will be bruised when they make an observation. I've had to coach people and help them un…

Although I have have met and currently work with many people who struggle with direct interactions to an extent where one could consider it a personal problem, I have also found that people who are direct or don't "beat around the bush" also often get VERY upset when treated similarly. I'm not saying that there's no space for direct communication and that everyone needs to be formal and socially polite during every i…

Like, everyone who is Dutch?

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

#372

Post by IshKebab »

Joker_vD wrote: post #370
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. You know, one'd think that having a complex hardware should make writing a driver easier because the hardware is able to take care of itself just fine, and provide a reasonable interface, as opposed to devices of the yore which you had to babysit, wasting your main CPU's time, and doing si…

No, the complexity usually isn't hidden. It's the driver's job to do that.

I guess one exception maybe is Nvidia who have sort of hidden the complexity by moving most driver functionality onto software on the card. At least that's how I understood it. Don't quote me on that.

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

#373

Post by typpilol »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #349
eklitzke wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sto…

> custom Wifi board Why didn't you use something more mainstream? Cost?

Probably some weird design spec or size requirement

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

#374

Post by IshKebab »

markus_zhang wrote: post #211
WD-42 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get it man. It’s really tough. How old is your kid? Mine is a 5 years old boy and he doesn’t seem to need a lot of sleep but a huge amount of companionship which really bugs me out. In theory, it’s better to sleep early, get up around 5 and get 2 hours of quality time, but man he sometimes gets up around 6:15 and earlier, and I found it difficult to get good sleep anyway, so I tried to switch to 2 hours of night ti…

> They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends.

Definitely depends on the specific children!

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

#375

Post by nolist_policy »

v9v wrote: post #59
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…

Maybe not applicable for the XR platform here, but you could add introspection capabilities not present in Linux, a la Genera letting the developer hotpatch driver-level code, or get all processes running on a shared address space which lets processes pass pointers around instead of the Unix model of serializing/deserializing data for communication ( http://metamodular.com/Common-Lisp/lispos.html )

You can do that on Linux today with vfork.

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

#376

Post by Joker_vD »

IshKebab wrote: post #372
Joker_vD wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern hardware is just so complicated it would take a long time to completely document, and even longer to write a driver for. You know, one'd think that having a complex hardware should make writing a driver easier because the hardware is able to take care of itself just fine, and provide a reasonable interface, as opposed to devices of the yore which you had to babysit, wasting your main CPU's time, and doing si…

No, the complexity usually isn't hidden. It's the driver's job to do that. I guess one exception maybe is Nvidia who have sort of hidden the complexity by moving most driver functionality onto software on the card. At least that's how I understood it. Don't quote me on that.

> No, the complexity usually isn't hidden. It's the driver's job to do that.

Why not, though? We used to have e.g. glass teletypes with microprocessors (8080/8051) in them that exposed a serial bus with very neat command protocol that we still use nowadays, that could boot up, init and self-test all on their own.

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

#378

Post by [deleted] »

this_user wrote: post #250
randall wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

meta was a weird place for a while. because of psc (the performance rating stuff) being so important… a public post could totally demoralize a team because if a legend like carmack thinks that your project is a waste of resources, how is that going to look on your performance review? impact is facebook for “how useful is this to the company” and its an explicit axis of judgement.

How large is their headcount these days? And how many actually useful products have they launched in the last decade? You could probably go full Twitter and fire 90% of the people, and it would make no difference from a user perspective.

[deleted]

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

#380

Post by underdeserver »

deadbabe wrote: post #354
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.…

Wouldn’t LLMs make it way easier

I think this is one area where LLMS would be particularly bad at. Opaque code with no documentation across the field.
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