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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

#81

> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.

You've concluded this from a single, brief, throwaway line? Any madness you perceive about this situation has been fabricated by you, based on the details we have.

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

#82

> 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

I'm sure that kind of crap helped nudge JC out of there. He mentions (accurate and relevant) reasons why something is probably a bad idea, and the person in charge of doing it complains that JC brought up the critiques, rather than addressing the critiques themselves. What a pathetic, whiny thing to do.

Ugly people like to blame the mirrors.

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

#83

And yet, Sony did it, Nintendo did it, both have been pretty succeesful. We also need to be clear what an OS is. Is it "darwin" or "macOS" - they have different scopes. Things I'd want from an OS for an XR device. 1. Fast boot. I don't want to have to wait 2-3-4-5 minutes to reboot for those times I need to reboot. I feel like Nintendo figured this out? It updates the OS in the background somehow and reboot is nearly…

Sony and Nintendo both forked off of either NetBSD or FreeBSD. Sony's cameras at least up until the A7S2 run Linux (there's jailbreaks for these), although I never found any kernel / bootloader dump like it would be required. Android suffers from being Java at the core, with all the baggage that brings with it.

Sony forked FreeBSD, but Nintendo didn't. They have BSD license headers because of some BSD socket code they include.

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

#84
post #25

> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.

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 know if something is important, basically.

Just like Louis CK said, "if you used 'amazing' on chicken nuggets, what are you going to say when your first child is born?". But in reverse.

Personally, I'd rather work with someone who would tell me my work is terrible if it is.

In Germany, you can't even legally say somebody did a bad job at your company in a recommendation letter. Companies created a whole subtext to workaround that, it's crazy.

Some things are just bad. You should be able to say it is. Not by saying it could be better. Not by using euphemism. It's just something that needs to go to the trash.

In fact, I don't trust people who can't receive this information, even if not packaged with tact (which you should attempt to, but life happens). If you can't handle people not being perfectly polite every time, I can't help but feel I won't be able to count on you when things get hard.

That must be the French in me talking.

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

#85
post #65
post #6

You could write a book on why it's practically impossible to create a new OS these days. Love Carmack for stating it so clearly. I also love that called out TempleOS, I also have a weird respect for it. Plan 9 is the probably the best example of a totally new OS and I hope someday it becomes viable because it's really a joy to use. But ultimately it just makes sense to adapt existing kernels / OS (say, arch) and adap…

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.

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

#86
post #47
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought they rolled back all of those efforts. What devices shipping today come with Fuchsia installed?

According to Wikipedia, looks like only the Nest Nub.

I think some of the Nest audio devices now run it as well.

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

#87
Mechanisms for getting the linux kernel out of the way is pretty decent these days, and CPUs with a lot of cores are common. That means you can isolate a bunch of cores and pin threads the way you want, and then use some kernel-bypass to access hardware directly. Communicate between cores using ring buffers.

This gives you best of both worlds - carefully designed system for the hardware with near optimal performance, and still with the ability to take advantage of the full linux kernel for management, monitoring, debugging, etc.

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

#88

> they also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad This is madness. The safe space culture has really gone too far.

A meeting with HR is not madness. No one got maimed or died, or even lost work, seemingly. Some people exchanged words.

Cool off.

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

#89

tbh linux has quite a bit of cruft in it these days at the syscall and interface layer. if youre apple, it does make sense to do stuff from scratch. i think in a way, software guys wind up building their own prisons. an api is created to solve problem X given world Y, but world Y+1 has a different set of problems - problems that may no longer be adequately addressed given the api invented for X. people talk about "re…

Apple doesn't do a lot of baremetal development from scratch that I'm aware of. The Lightning to HDMI dongle bootstraps an XNU kernel with an AirPlay decoder into 256MB RAM, for instance.

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

#90
post #37

And yet, Sony did it, Nintendo did it, both have been pretty succeesful. We also need to be clear what an OS is. Is it "darwin" or "macOS" - they have different scopes. Things I'd want from an OS for an XR device. 1. Fast boot. I don't want to have to wait 2-3-4-5 minutes to reboot for those times I need to reboot. I feel like Nintendo figured this out? It updates the OS in the background somehow and reboot is nearly…

You mean for the PlayStation? That is a FreeBSD fork, probably chosen over Linux because of the license.

Nintendo is an interesting example though. According to Wikipedia they actually use a proprietary microkernel, which, if I'm reading this right, I think they developed themselves. Looks like the only open source components they have is some networking code which is published under the BSD license.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softw...

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