But what should you be running on an XR headset? The OS has to be real time.
Linux can sort of do that. Probably a stripped down Linux. About 90% of Linux is irrelevant or undesirable in this application.
John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
391–400 of 675 posts
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard disagree. Being tactful is only relevant when dealing with people , criticise an idea, a project, a solution as much as you like. Intellectual debate is the fire from which genuinely good ideas are forged.
Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about. Like it or not, some tact when dealing with these things goes a long way.
> Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about.
This is true of course, but this is also true for the “search for truth” in science. Do we fail to point out the flaw in the reasoning of someone’s life's work for fear of offence? The truth is the higher ideal that must be strived for!
In the same way, an idea is only good once it has been challenged. It may fail and dissolve, it may survive, it may morph into something that can no longer be assailed. This is the forgers fire, and it is necessary.
I know this isn’t as black and white as I’m painting it, but the ideal is still something worth striving for.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#393Where can I find Jonathan Blows “Why can’t we even conceive of writing a new OS today” post? No luck when searching for it
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#394The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
Quite pessimistic view, but hard to argue against based on available data samples.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#395The problem when working for Meta is that if you do a good job, you've helped make the world worse... so the real heroes are the people wasting money and reducing efficiency If you're at all competent, go work somewhere else
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Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#396Where can I find Jonathan Blows “Why can’t we even conceive of writing a new OS today” post? No luck when searching for it
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> use some kernel-bypass to access hardware directly You can always mmap /dev/mem to get at physical memory.
No, that's not really what kernel bypass means.
Accessing hardware directky via /dev/mem is literally the original kernel bypass strategy, before we got the UIO and VFIO APIs to do it in a blessed way.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#398Sigh. It's really depressing how a technical discussion on merits of a solution keeps getting reported to HR. I've seen it many times.
Someone said your preferred design won't work, and you go to HR.
I gladly throw my idea under the bus when I hear why it's bad.
Now offering any critique of a thing in order to help the company comes with a career risk.
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#399> 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…
Yeah, people getting really angry if you say anything bad about a product (!) is a depressing commonality in certain places these days.
I got angry emails from people because I wrote "replacing a primary page of UI with this feature I never use doesn't give me a lot of value" because statements like that make "the team feel bad". It was an internal beta test with purpose of finding issues before they go public.
Not surprisingly, once this culture holds root, the products start going down the drain too.
But who cares about good products in this great age of AI, right?
Re: John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta
#400But what should you be running on an XR headset? The OS has to be real time. Linux can sort of do that. Probably a stripped down Linux. About 90% of Linux is irrelevant or undesirable in this application.
Unless you’re designing the silicon yourself, stripping user space from Linux is several orders of magnitude easier than writing new device drivers for your brand new OS.