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

• beeflet 1y ago
  Why bother making a new OS when you can make a new user interface for an existing OS? The drivers are the hard part. It takes a lot of inter-industry collaboration to get driver compatibility
• FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  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 conquering the market with their "go with us, we're the open alternative to iOS" marketing. The conclusion is to just never EVER trust big-tech/VC/PE companies, even when they do nice things, since they're 100% just playing the long game, getting buddy-buddy with you waiting till they smothered the competition with their warchest, and then the inevitable rug-pull comes once you're tied to their ecosystem and you have nowhere else to go. Avoid these scumbags, go FOSS form the start, go TempleOS. /s but not really
  • nine_k 1y ago
    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!
    • ch4s3 1y ago
      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.
  • thevillagechief 1y ago
    I'm not sure Carmack's point disagrees with you. Meta is still big tech, and if your goal is to monetize at scale, rolling out your own isn't the most efficient way to do it. I don't think he'd discourage you rolling out your own OS if it's your hobby FOSS project.
  • uxcolumbo 1y ago
    Can you explain the TempleOS meme reply? I don’t know enough about its history to get the joke.
    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      Just google/youtube the history of temple OS and its creator. It's fun, sad and tragic at the same time. Spoiler alert: a single person coded it in his own programming language, but the person suffered from severe mental illnesses and ended up taking their own life.
• jamesgeck0 1y ago
  > To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers. I mean, I'd give a fair shake to an OS from the SQLite team [1]. 1. https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
  • dwaltrip 1y ago
    Where do I apply to join this monastic order of OS programmers?
    • tgbugs 1y ago
      Just walk up to the gate of your nearest Concent next Apert and they will take you right in! Actually, I don't know how you join the Ita now that you mention it.
      • trenchpilgrim 1y ago
        The Ita were kind of an ethno-cultural group as much as they were a professional caste.
• frereubu 1y ago
  https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849 https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1961172409920491849
  • ypeterholmes 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • cubefox 1y ago
      The Twitter algorithm is open source, unlike the algorithm for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. I'm not aware of any evidence for bias in the algorithm.
      • thrance 1y ago
        It's not though. The GitHub repo was never updated once. Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident.
        • cubefox 1y ago
          > The GitHub repo was never updated once. Pretty sure that's false: I remember seeing the recent commit that made Grok misbehave. > Here's an experiment for you: open X in a new private tab and count political posts, see how many of them are far right. Bias is evident. Go to Bluesky and count far left posts. The result will be similar, because political bubbles form by themselves.
          • actionfromafar 1y ago
            Nazi bubbles form naturally around nazi owners.
          • thrance 1y ago
            https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm Not updated in two years. > Go to Bluesky... At least people are not fantasizing about "race wars" or discussing the "jewsish question" there. Two subjects I saw multiple times on X's front page.
• klik99 1y ago
  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 adapt it to your needs. It can be hair wrenchingly frustrating, and requires the company to be willing to upstream changes and it still takes years, but the alternative is decades, because what sounds good and well designed on paper just melts when it hits the real world, and linux has already gone through those decades of pain.
  • LaffertyDev 1y ago
    I would read that book.
  • EGreg 1y ago
    OS isnt the hard part. The driver ecosystem is the moat. Linux finally overcame it decades later
    • saulpw 1y ago
      Yeah, the Linux kernel has ~12m lines of code. <1m are the core, the rest are drivers.
      • CodeArtisan 1y ago
        29 Millions according to https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-AMDGPU-Driver-Size https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-AMDGPU-Driver-Size 5 Millions alone for the AMD graphic driver.
        • treyd 1y ago
          Much of that 5M are hardware register definitions expanded into C headers. I am not sure how you'd consolidate that but it's not like that's all bespoke C code.
• scared_together 1y ago
  What if instead of writing the entire OS, a company were to pick up an existing “hobby” OS and refine it? For example any of the systems listed in Carmack’s post. Or perhaps Serenity OS, RedoxOS, etc.
  • dmurray 1y ago
    In that case, why wouldn't they "just" fork Linux? Or 10-years-ago-Linux? The technical justification for Meta writing their own OS is that they'd get to make design decisions that suited them at a very deep level, not that they could do the work equivalent of contributing a few drivers to an existing choice.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • monkeyelite 1y ago
    How is that different than what they did? Meta stuff is on Linux. PlayStation and Nintendo on bsd, etc. If you mean exotic ones then the answer is the parts that are written are the easy parts and getting support for hardware and software is hard.
  • ellis0n 1y ago
    ACPU OS is also good for that https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast
• anthem2025 1y ago
  Did they have people who have built an OS before? I’ve seen this firsthand. These giant tech companies try to just jump into a massive new project thinking that because they have built such an impressive website and have so much experience at scale they should just be able to handle building a new OS. In my case it wasn’t even a new OS it was just building around an existing platform and even that was massively problematic. The companies that build them from scratch have had it as one of their core competencies pretty much from the start. I’m unsurprised meta had issues like this.
  • Skunkleton 1y ago
    > Did they have people who have built an OS before? Yes.
  • Jyaif 1y ago
    They have contributors to the linux kernel. Pretty sure all the big tech companies have the right people to create a new OS that is better than Linux, the hard part is getting that new OS to be adopted.
• BiteCode_dev 1y ago
  > 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.
  • aPoCoMiLogin 1y ago
    it is madness, you would be surprised how many ppl take things too serious. been there, had talk with HR cause i've said that the solution is mediocre and we have to do something better than that.
  • rectang 1y ago
    Something tells me that if we heard the other side of the story it might hit different. There's a lot of wiggle room in what "making his team members feel bad" could mean, and I would be surprised if constructively voiced criticism would have gotten someone written up.
    • cjbgkagh 1y ago
      With my experience of being written up for constructive criticism the reasoning was that I didn’t give constructive criticism to others and they felt singled out. I only give such criticism in private so of course they were not there to see the others. Apparently that wasn’t a sufficient explanation.
  • Inityx 1y ago
    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.
    • mariusor 1y ago
      From what you know of Carmack, does "can't give critical feedback in a professional setting without being rude or belittling others" sound like him to you? It does not to me, though granted maybe he's different in his non public persona than what you can see in presentations and talks.
• armchairhacker 1y ago
  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 been formally verified or extensively tested) and that’s enough?
  • jamboca 1y ago
    Think you answered your own question. No real differences except more articles, $, and hype
    • const_cast 1y ago
      And, let's be real here: engineering prestige. Everyone wants to make an OS because that's super cool and technical and hard. I mean, that's just resume gold. Using Linux is boring and easy. Yawwwwn. But nobody makes an OS from scratch, only crazy greybeard developers do that! The problem is, you're not crazy greybeard developers working out of your basement for the advancement of humanity. No. Youre paid employees of a mega corporation. You have no principles, no vision. You're not Linus Trovalds.
  • Nuthen 1y ago
    Based on the latter tweet in the chain, I'm wondering if Carmack is hinting that Foveated Rendering (more processing power is diverted towards the specific part of the screen you're looking at) was one advantage envisioned for it. But perhaps he's saying that he's not so sure if the performance gains from it actually justify building a custom OS instead of just overclocking the GPU along with an existing OS?
    • mook 1y ago
      Wouldn't that be an application (or at most system library) concern though? The OS is just there to sling pixels, it wouldn't have any idea whether those pixels are blurry… well for VR it would all be OpenGL or equivalent so the OS just did hardware access permissions.
• doctorpangloss 1y ago
  The problem with this guy is that it’s hard to criticize him, whether at work or in this forum. For example, I am going to be downvoted for mocking the fact that this guy thinks it’s some genius move to say “No” to making an operating system, whatever making an operating system means.
  • geodel 1y ago
    You can prove him wrong by doing thing what he claims should not be done.
    • doctorpangloss 1y ago
      See? This is why the Doom man got paid the big bucks. The Doom man has a literacy distortion field.
• tanvach 1y ago
  I think people have forgotten about Google Fuchsia which I guess is a good sign for a new OS. They’ve done quite well in deploying it seamlessly to their consumer devices.
  • blkhp19 1y ago
    I thought they rolled back all of those efforts. What devices shipping today come with Fuchsia installed?
    • AceJohnny2 1y ago
      Google Nest Hub
    • aschla 1y ago
      According to Wikipedia, looks like only the Nest Nub.
      • kyle-rb 1y ago
        I think some of the Nest audio devices now run it as well.
  • koolala 1y ago
    The reviews I've seen of its stability and usefulness have not been good.
    • tanvach 1y ago
      Yup it’s because they had to rewrite the drivers I presume. Always going to be the biggest issue with any new OS.
    • 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
      That was also frustrating in that sel4 was right there. Why not invest efforts in the existing thing?
• varelse 1y ago
  [dead]
• GeekyBear 1y ago
  My objection is that there is no universe in which Meta can be trusted with direct access to your raw gaze tracking data. The only thing I can imagine that would be more invasive would require a brain implant.
  • qiine 1y ago
    sadly they are working on it
  • mrpippy 1y ago
    My understanding is that this is a key tenant of visionOS’s design, where apps don’t get access to gaze data (I think unless they’re taking over the full screen?)
• jnwatson 1y ago
  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.
  • tanvach 1y ago
    Yeah reverse engineering all the drivers is going to be a huge headache.
    • markus_zhang 1y ago
      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.
      • wmf 1y ago
        Asahi Linux.
      • toast0 1y ago
        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 https://wiki.osdev.org/User:Zesterer/Bare_Bones [2] https://osdev.wiki/wiki/Multiboot1_Bare_Bones https://osdev.wiki/wiki/Multiboot1_Bare_Bones
        • markus_zhang 1y ago
• greggman65 1y ago
  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 instant. 2. Zero jank. I'm on XR, if the OS janks in any way people will get sick AND perceive the product as sucking. At least I do. iOS is smooth, Androind is jank AF. Do any of the existing OSes provide this? Sure, maybe take an existing OS an modify it, assuming you can.
  • numpad0 1y ago
    PS4/5 was BSD. Only Nintendo and Microsoft runs own corporate proprietary OS.
  • erk__ 1y ago
    You mean for the PlayStation? That is a FreeBSD fork, probably chosen over Linux because of the license.
    • amarant 1y ago
      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_software https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softw...
      • raggi 1y ago
        Yeah, the various docs and presentations given by reversers on the details of nintendos os really showcase a lot of good design choices. An impressive amount of work for just trying to enforce a harder IP moat around entertainment software.
  • deleted 1y ago
• webdevver 1y ago
  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 "rewrite everything in rust" - I say, why stop there? lets go down to the metal. make every byte, every instruction, every syscall a commodity. imagine if we could go all the way back to bare metal programming, simply by virtue of the LLM auto-coding the bootloader, scheduler, process manager, all in-situ. the software world is full of circularities like that. we went from Mainframe -> local -> mainframe, why not baremetal -> hosted -> baremetal?
  • trollied 1y ago
    You can still do “unsafe” stuff in rust, and people do. It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. And you don’t have to deal with a borrow checker, and a very small pool of developers available to hire.
    • AceJohnny2 1y ago
      > It’s perfectly possible to write safe C and C++ these days. It's also very hard to do so.
      • lyu07282 1y ago
        The chrome team doesn't manage that, but perhaps they are just bad at C++ /s
    • webdevver 1y ago
      oh, i didnt mean to invoke rust in any technical sense - i brought up rust to introduce an example of the attitude that rust people are known for, namely "why not rewrite everything?", which a lot of people have a kneejerk rejection of.
  • xantronix 1y ago
• tanvach 1y ago
  Was at Oculus post acquisition and can say that the whole XROS was an annoyance and distraction the core technology teams didn’t need. There were so many issues with multiple tech stacks that needed fixing first. Mind you, this XROS idea came after Oculus reorged into FB proper. It felt to me like there were FB teams (or individuals) that wanted get on the ARVR train. Carmack was absolutely right, and after the reorg his influence slowly waned for the worse.
  • dedup-com 1y ago
    Just a small bunch of XROS people came from FB proper (mostly managers) because an average FB SWE has no required skills. Most folks were hired from the industry at E5/E6 and I think we had ever took one or two bootcampers that ultimately were not successful and quickly moved elsewhere in FB.
    • globnomulous 1y ago
      What were the required skills that bootcampers lacked? Has anybody without a university degree succeeded there?
      • dedup-com 1y ago
        Knowledge of C (XROS was written in C and during the interviews the candidate rather uncommonly wasn't given a choice of programming language) and general understanding of how a computer works at a low level. Knowing the purpose of "volatile", understanding cache lines, mapping virtual memory to physical memory, DMA, this kind of thing. I think everyone had a degree but looking at my degree (applied math) in particular nothing that I had learned at the uni was immediately useful and I think there isn't really anything that would prevent a smart person with a GED and some history of, say, Linux kernel contributions from succeeding on a team like this. Except may be a degree is needed for H1B visa for those who need it.
      • dedup-com 1y ago
        I just realized that you might not know what a "bootcamper" is. Facebook's hiring process generally goes like this: - you're interviewed with a random team and evaluated if you'd be a good fit for the company. - you are hired and go through a multi-week "bootcamp" to learn FB's vocabulary, processes, and tech stack, fixing some real bugs and implementing some real (but minor) features in the process. - upon completing the bootcamp you seek a team that is of interest to you and if interest is mutual, you join the team. If you can't find a team after X weeks, you part ways with the company.
• lukev 1y ago
  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 potentially be astronomical. Just another case of quarterly-report-driven decision making, I suppose. Sigh.
  • philistine 1y ago
    Apple bought one of those in the 90s, and they are still reaping the benefits of that strategic initiative. But the thing is, NeXt allowed Apple to think up new, differentiated products. If you come at the problem of the OS from a purely technical perspective, you'll waste time for no gain.
  • spankalee 1y ago
    This is what Google has been trying to do with Fuchsia and the fact is that you can't escape the product point of view because the products exist, already have an OS stack, and get pretty defensive when another team tells them they're going to replace their OS, or their core if the product team is Android or Chrome OS.
  • jmull 1y ago
    How does it pay off in the long run? If you're competing against nothing, then I see it: it opens up a wide variety of product possibilities. But linux exists. Why not spend 1/1000th the time to adapt linux? That's not even counting the rather substantial risk that your new OS will never approach the capabilities of linux, and may very well never become generally usable at all. Option A: spend years and millions on a project that may never be as good as existing solutions, diverting attention and resources from actual products, or... Option B: work on products now, using an existing, high-quality, extensible, adaptable OS, with very friendly licensing terms, for which numerous experts exist, with a proven track record of maintenance, a working plan for sustainability, a large & healthy developer community exists, etc. It's hard to imagine how it wouldn't be a complete waste of time.
  • 1y ago
• labrador 1y ago
  > 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
  • tejohnso 1y ago
    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.
    • pklausler 1y ago
      Ugly people like to blame the mirrors.
    • crote 1y ago
      You've got to remember that context is critical with stuff like this. There's nothing wrong with well-founded and thoughtful criticism. On the other hand, it is very easy for this to turn into personal attacks or bullying - even if it wasn't intended to be. If you're not careful you'll end up with juniors copying the style and phrasing of less-carefully-worded messages of their tech demigod, and you end up with a huge hostile workplace behaviour cesspit. It's the same reason why Linus Torvalds took a break to reflect on his communication style: no matter how strongly you feel about a topic, you can't let your emotions end up harming the community. So yes, I can totally see poorly-worded critiques leading to HR complaints. Having to think twice about the impact of the things you write is an essential part of being at a high level in a company, you simply can't afford to be careless anymore. It's of course impossible to conclude that this is what happened in this specific case without further details, but it definitely wouldn't be the first time something like this happened with a tech legend.
  • gmueckl 1y ago
    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 physical health impacts on people.
• 0xb0565e486 1y ago
  I'd love a truly new OS, but I just don’t know what it would look like at this point? "New OS" ideas tend to converge on the same trunk. Building a hobby OS taught me how little is just "software". The CPU sets the rules. Page tables exist because the MMU says so. Syscalls are privilege flips. Task switches are register loads and TLB churn. Drivers are interrupt choreography. The OS to me is just policy wrapped around fixed machinery.
  • cma 1y ago
    try to quickly spawn a lot of processes on windows
  • ellis0n 1y ago
    I think any OS can be divided into a "backend" that deals with the hardware and a "frontend" user-level applications with a UI. The backend is mostly similar everywhere, while the frontend is what the general public typically perceives as the "OS". It's hard to see anything truly new in the "invisible" backend, but the frontend changes with every update (Windows, Mac, Linux etc). ACPU OS is a good example of this, where the backend can be a different OS, an emulator or actual hardware, while the frontend remains the same across all execution environments. https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast
• thrance 1y ago
  He's acting like their VR UX is top notch when it's as bad as it gets. Just yesterday I dusted off my Meta Quest 2 to play a bit, and spent around an hour trying to pair up my left controller to the helmet after replacing the battery. You can't do it without going through their fucking app, that asks for every permissions under the sun, including GPS positioning for some reason. After finally getting this app working and pairing it with my headset, I could finally realize the controller was just dead and their was nothing to do.
  • toast0 1y ago
    > You can't do it without going through their fucking app, that asks for every permissions under the sun, including GPS positioning for some reason. If it uses bluetooth, which it might for the controller?, the permission for bluetooth on Android is fine location --- the same permission as for using GPS. That might be the same permission you need for wifi stuff, too? Because products and services exist to turn bluetooth and wifi mac addresses seen into a fine location. But who knows what they do with the GPS signal after they ask for it?
    • thrance 1y ago
      No, it doesn't use Bluetooth. Or maybe it does under the hood but the permissions they ask for are GPS and "see nearby devices". You are able to pair your device with Bluetooth disabled in the phone's quick menu.
  • lyu07282 1y ago
    You can pair the controllers in the settings you don't need an app. Their VR UX does suck that is true, and horizon worlds is such a collosal failure that I'm surprised they haven't cancelled that entirely yet. But carmack also stated the technical issues numerous times.
    • thrance 1y ago
      No you can't? By their own documentation, you have to use the app: https://www.meta.com/fr-fr/help/quest/967070027432609/ https://www.meta.com/fr-fr/help/quest/967070027432609/ And my quick search on the internet yielded no other mean to pair controllers.
• rezmason 1y ago
  > To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers. Which was sort of Plan 9… Roll call!
• pipeline_peak 1y ago
  Jonathan Blow is the world’s most successful hobbyist programmer. His whole thing is doing projects from scratch. Every game he made could be done in Unity with far less effort. Most opinions of this man exists in a vacuum space isolated from the real world software industry. Building an OS from scratch is one of those examples. It’s never seems like there’s a significant reason behind them other than………”I made dat :P”
  • savanaly 1y ago
    As an outsider...his games just look and feel different. They feel like bones-deep art, in a way that even the best of the best games (say, Hades) don't. Since Blow's games are puzzle games they're not even my favorite games! But the effort spent on making them exactly the way he wants them pays off.
  • jambutters 1y ago
    I don't think unity was as polished when braid came out in ~2008 that can also easily rewind time on low end Xbox hardware. The witness maybe in unreal? But there are some wild things there I've never seen an unreal game do that the witness does do
  • dboon 1y ago
    It is genuinely ridiculous to say that the witness could “have been made in Unity with far less effort”. It’s easy to forget that people on this and ever forum love to just say stuff for the sake of having said something until you encounter a topic with which you are extremely familiar.
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    He got the right to be acknowledged by his peers for the work he has made at GDC, and anyone can make games with Unity, just like everyone can make a novel with Word, now making one without pre made tooling, that is a skill on itself. Why is such a meme among gamers about Unity and Unreal based games? Exactly because so many make so little effort it is clear where the game is coming from.
  • newlisp 1y ago
• SirMaster 1y ago
  How about ReactOS?
• gorset 1y ago
  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.
  • ronsor 1y ago
    > use some kernel-bypass to access hardware directly You can always mmap /dev/mem to get at physical memory.
    • fooker 1y ago
      No, that's not really what kernel bypass means.
      • oasisaimlessly 1y ago
        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.
• agsnu 1y ago
  Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-haibo https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...
  • jambutters 1y ago
    They actually reuse Linux driver stack for hardware compatibility
  • ronsor 1y ago
    The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.
    • betaby 1y ago
      > because of state backing and state objectives MS is a state backed company. Very natural that China went the same path.
      • howdyhowdy123 1y ago
        No it isn't
        • SgtBastard 1y ago
          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.
          • 1718627440 1y ago
            Yes, but the power play seams to be more like MS backes several states.
• ironman1478 1y ago
  I worked on a completely different hardware project within meta and while they didn't want a custom OS, they used an off the shelf rtos with the intention of modifying it and it was a shit show. They had a million justifications for why they needed it, but they had no performance tests or metrics to verify to actually justify it. They incurred a huge development overhead for no verifiable performance improvements. None of the code they wrote couldn't have just been written as a kernel module in Linux. It would've also been so much easier due to all the documentation and general knowledge people have about Linux both within the company and outside the company.
• numpad0 1y ago
  Is the difficulty in theoretical complexity of operating systems, or in project scoping/scope creep? It's probably not that hard to write bare metal code for a modern CPU that runs and crashes. It's obviously insurmountably hard to compete with Android in features with scratch built bare metal code. An "OS" can be anything between the two. But it's very easy to imagine an "XR OS" project snowballing quickly into the latter, and Carmack's concerns would be spot on(as always is, and as proven). Is it then an inherent difficulty in "designing a new operating system", or is it technically something else?
  • loeg 1y ago
    XROS definitely suffered from scope creep and an outrageous set of goals/priorities.
  • monkeyelite 1y ago
    the thread lists examples like 3rd party software
• busymom0 1y ago
  > I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad, but I expect many of them would acknowledge in hindsight that the Meta products would not be in a better place today if the new OS effort had been rammed into them. So someone at Meta was so sensitive that being told their behemoth of a project was ill advised ended up getting reported to HR?
  • aprilthird2021 1y ago
    Yep, I can 100% believe it having worked in such environments
• danielodievich 1y ago
  Back in mmm like 2002 or 2003 or 2004 while at Microsoft I read an internal paper from a few OS guys who hackathoned something for Bill Gates's Think Week (which is when he used to go to some island in San Juans or somewhere similar and just read curated papers and think, it was a huge prestige to get such a paper to him) and that something was an OS written from scratch with GC and memory management on top of something very .NET framework'y (which was released a couple of years ago. They had it booting on all kinds of hardware and doing various neato things. One of explicitly called design principles was 0 compatibility with anything Windows before. Which is why it didn't go anywhere I assume. I remember it was just a handful of engineers (presumably OS folks) hacking for like a month. . It was awesome to read about.
  • scrlk 1y ago
    Was it Singularity? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...
    • modeless 1y ago
      Singularity was cool. I'm sad that it was abandoned. The concept of using software isolation instead of hardware memory protection was really interesting.
  • adastra22 1y ago
    It was a multi-year project at Microsoft Research with a team of >100 developers. https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatever-happened-to-microsofts-midori-operating-system-project/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatever-happened-to-microsoft...
    • danielodievich 1y ago
      I am very certain in my recollection that this was started much earlier than this as hackathon skunkworks before something like this happened at MSR. It didn't do anything beyond kernel and command line, there was no browser. I don't know if those two shared roots either. Anyhow, but yeah, still both were intellectual feats!
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > 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 coworkers tried to weaponize HR to push their agenda. Every effort was eventually dismissed by HR, but there is a chilling effect on everyone when you realize that someone at the company is trying to put your job at stake because they didn't like something you said. The next time around, the people targeted are much more hesitant to speak up.
  • randall 1y ago
    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.
    • aprilthird2021 1y ago
      But... That's not an HR violation. If something a team is working on is a waste of resources, it's a waste. You can either realize that and pivot to something more useful (like an effort to take the improvements of the current OS project and apply them to existing OSes), or stubbornly insist on your value. Why is complaining to HR even an option on the table?
      • fluoridation 1y ago
        Complaining is always an option. The problem is that HR actually takes the complaint seriously.
      • firesteelrain 1y ago
        One could argue that if it’s not in your swim lane, you just let it fail. And if you aren’t that person’s manager, you tell them the code or design that you are reviewing and thus the gatekeeper is not adequate. Politely. You said your part and no need to get yourself in trouble. Document and move on. If the company won’t listen then you move on. No need to turn it into a HR issue.
• poopiokaka 1y ago
  Lost me and TempleOS
• skhameneh 1y ago
  When you're at a certain scale it makes sense. That scale is when creating an OS gives you a clear advantage over licensing or working with an open source OS. Every other scale below that it's for knowledge, growth, research, or fun.
• dmazzoni 1y ago
  I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia. They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with. They had a huge team. Hundreds of people. It was so ambitious. But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it. Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan. If they wanted to build a new kernel that could replace Linux on Android and/or Chrome OS, that would have been worth exploring - it would have had at least a chance at success. But no, they wanted to build a new OS from scratch, including not just the kernel but the UI libraries and window manager too, all from scratch. That's why the only platform they were able to target was Google's Home Hub - one of the few Google products that had a UI but wasn't a complete platform (no third-party apps, for example). And even there, I don't think they had a compelling story for why their OS was worth the added complexity. It boggles my mind that Fuchsia is still going on. They should have killed it years ago. It's so depressing that they did across-the-board layoffs, including taking away resources from critically underfunded teams, while leaving projects like Fuchsia around wasting time and effort on a worthless endeavor. Instead they just kept reducing Fuchsia while still keeping it going. For what?
  • nashashmi 1y ago
    Wasn’t Fuchsia supposed to be a platform where different OS could run in a virtual environment and software packages would be complete containers? Was not this a new way of tackling the ancient OS problem? These were my imaginations. I thought maybe an OS that could run on the web. Or an OS that could be virtualized to run on several machines. Or an OS that could be run along several other instances on the same machine each catering to a different user.
    • CyberDildonics 1y ago
      Reinventing QNX will be cutting edge for decades to come.
    • surajrmal 1y ago
      That doesn't sound anything like what fuchsia is or ever was. Fuchsia takes a different set of tradeoffs with respect to baseline primitives and built a new stack of low level user space on top of those new primitives. This gives the software fundamentally different properties which might be better or worse for your use case. For consumer hardware products I think it comes out ahead, but only time will tell.
• globalnode 1y ago
  I love this part: "To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers"
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• emmelaich 1y ago
  I wonder whether an unarticulated desire of Meta's was to avoid any license issues that could incur by using Linux or any other existing OS.
• zer0zzz 1y ago
  I was there when they wanted to do the custom XROS. I remember asking them in a Q&A session exactly why they would build this and I recall the reasoning behind it totally fell flat. Fundamentally it became clear these guys just wanted to write a new OS because they thought it would be cool or fun. Much of the scenarios they tried to address could have been done with Mach or some realtime kernel or with fuchsia. I recall later on they did consider using fuchsia as the user space for the os for some time. On another note, there was similarly an equally “just for fun” language effort in the org as well (eg “FNL”). That was also conceived by a bunch of randos who weren’t a bunch of compiler guys that had no product vision and just did it for fun. Well when the era of efficiency arrived all of this stuff ended.
• Ericson2314 1y ago
  I'm surprised at the comments here. Linux's days as the sole hegemon are numbered.
• throwaway984393 1y ago
  [dead]
• swiftcoder 1y ago
  The problem that is kind of glossed over here is that Meta hired a bunch of folks from Microsoft who were primarily interested in writing operating systems, and set them to work on XR - obviously they wanted to write a custom operating system
• whatever1 1y ago
  The engineers were right. “If not us then who”. Meta has the talent and the balance sheet to pull this off. Worst case scenario we end up with one more open sourced operating system. Who knows what happens 20 years down the line.
• procaryote 1y ago
  The 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
  • considerdevs 1y ago
    Quite pessimistic view, but hard to argue against based on available data samples.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • wolvesechoes 1y ago
    But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company? Even if founders may had some other goals in addition to making money, as the time passes profit becomes the only goal, and usually more profit is being generated while doing bad and malicious things. Problem is systemic.
    • keysdev 1y ago
      Depending on the founder. With Apple it can be reasoned that it only went down after you know who passed away. Yeah its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing, but that is what the corporate model has being doing and how we ended up here.
      • lyu07282 1y ago
        > its not reliable to count on one charismatic leader to run the whole thing > it only went down after you know who passed away. I mean that's kind of ironic. You believe that Jobs was a great and decent person who led Apple to be roses and rainbows. Outside this cult of personality it was a company that engaged in unethical and monopolistic business practices just as anyone else did, walled-garden lock-in of their platform, intentionally making their devices impossible to repair, planned obsolescence, slave labor conditions in manufacturing, etc. etc. So the point is untrue, its the benevolent dictator delusion, just like there are no benevolent political authoritarian leaders so are there no benevolent CEOs either. Because the system itself is the issue, authoritarianism/capitalism. If you are a conservative/authoritarian you believe in the former if you are a liberal/libertarian/capitalist you believe in the latter.
• Animats 1y ago
  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.
  • hnlmorg 1y ago
    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.
• emoII 1y ago
  Where can I find Jonathan Blows “Why can’t we even conceive of writing a new OS today” post? No luck when searching for it
  • ipsum2 1y ago
    https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1954574841547464739 https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1954574841547464739
• knorker 1y ago
  Sigh. 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.
• thrown-0825 1y ago
  I lost a lot of respect for carmack when he joined meta. The company is a black hole of wasted talent.
• sulam 1y ago
  Late 2019 I had a short conversation with Abrash about a new OS for the next set of glasses and my immediate reaction was “why?” He was adamant that there was a security need which Linux could not fill (his big concern was too much surface area for exploits in the context of untrusted 3rd party code). I remember thinking that this would be a surprise to cloud engineers at the big hosters, but chose not to continue the argument. He didn’t get where he is by being dramatically wrong very often, after all, but it still struck me as a waste. Note I did not work at Meta so he may have had stronger justifications he chose not to expose.
• ozgrakkurt 1y ago
  Brace! Here comes “I said don’t build it, but they did anyway” comments. They should have did what you said, you were right, don’t worry
• frognumber 1y ago
  John describes exactly what I'd like someone to build: "To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers." As a thought experiment: * Pick a place where cost-of-living is $200/month * Set up a village which is very livable. Fresh air. Healthy food. Good schools. More-or-less for the cost that someone rich can sponsor without too much sweat. * Drop a load of computers with little to no software, and little to no internet * Try reinventing the computing universe from scratch. Patience is the key. It'd take decades.
  • sim7c00 1y ago
    been writing an OS for ever 10 years to try. its seriously not something you want to do if you want to get anywhere. then again,its a lot of fun, maybe imagining where it could be some day if you had an army of slave programmers (because still it wont make money lol)
  • mastermage 1y ago
    Honestly sounds like a very cool Science fiction concept.
    • Zeebrommer 1y ago
      A bit like Anathem.
    • percentcer 1y ago
      Not quite the same but check out A Canticle for Leibowitz
  • ksec 1y ago
    Love this idea and wondering where that low cost of living place would be. But genuinely asking; What problem are we trying to solve that is not possible right now? Do we start from hardware at the CPU ? I remember one of an ex Intel engineer once said, you could learn about all the decisions which makes modern ISA and CPU uArch design, along with GPU and how it all works together, by the time you have done all that and could implement a truly better version from a clean sheet, you are already close to retiring . And that is assuming you have the professional opportunity to learn about all these, implementation , fail and make mistakes and relearn etc.
• Pocomon 1y ago
  Whom the gods would destroy, they first persuade to design an OS :)
• A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  To be fair, monastic order of engineers is absolutely what the world could use about now.
• rationalfaith 1y ago
  [dead]
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• qoez 1y ago
  I'd love to hear John's more detailed take on TempleOS
• aterris 1y ago
  T
• tomovo 1y ago
  Does SteamOS count as something Carmack would discourage as well? Yes it's a Linux-based system and yes even based on an existing distro, but it is a purpose-specific OS and it seems like it's working well for Valve and people using it to play Windows games without Windows...
  • jjmarr 1y ago
    End of the tweet: > I can only really see a new general purpose OS arriving due to essentially sacrificing a highly successful product’s optimality to the goal of birthing the new OS
• Ericson2314 1y ago
  The fact that Facebook, a company far richer than Bell labs ever was, like all FAANG, has a culture of expensive employees baby sitting broken software products (rather than lab researcher vs field technician separation), and cannot be bothered to do the long term investment in a new OS, is why I think the industry actually doesn't deserve these R&D tax breaks HN was bemoaning had gone away until this year. The point of R&D is the time horizon is long, and the uncertainty is high. Making JS slop that then has to be constantly babysat is opex, not capex.
• ellis0n 1y ago
  I've been developing a solo ACPU OS for many years now, one that's fast and simple enough to be better than any known OS. That's why I believe all OS development problems come from overengineering and overcapitalization. https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast https://www.acpul.org/blog/so-fast
• mrandish 1y ago
  > I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad Carmack being Carmack, I'm sure the HR report came to nothing but it's just another reminder of the annoyances I don't miss about working at a BigCo. In the end, it doesn't matter that it went nowhere, that he was right or that it was an over-reaction and likely a defensive move in inter-group politics Carmack wasn't even playing - it just slowly saps your emotional energy to care about doing the right things in the right ways.
  • Hydraulix989 1y ago
    You don't report someone like Carmack to HR, it will only backfire and make your ignorance even more visible. Also, I am not surprised he was reported -- typical underhanded political hustling commonplace at Meta.
    • flkenosad 1y ago
      Report whoever you want to HR people. Don't listen to this guy ^
      • DennisP 1y ago
        Hopefully for a better reason than the report against John Carmack.
      • Hydraulix989 1y ago
        I will give you the benefit of the doubt and interpret your comment as not specifically accusatory towards Carmack: Report someone to HR who deserves to be reported to HR, not someone who gave genuine good-faith (and in this case, correct) technical feedback that unfortunately got in the way of someone else's promo packet / empire building. There are certainly good reasons to report someone to HR. This is not one of them. Only toxic workplaces tolerate such pettiness. And ultimately, XROS was canned by Boz anyways.
• GeorgeTirebiter 1y ago
  People are nailing it here -- it's not the "OS" per se (heck, look at CP/M or original unix and this gives you a floor) -- it's the drivers and the required Standard Pieces: DMA, memory protection, TCP/IP, BLE, WiFi, Ethernet, GPU, USB (+ vast USB drivers), etc. Lotta 'standard' software must work on any new OS + drivers for all that hardware that is always changing. Great 'fun' .... Now, I do think Minix had a chance for a very short window, but lack of resources made sure it's now only an OS history footnote. All because a microkernel sucks 3% performance away from monolithic kernels. We are confused as an Industry... Performance uber alles -- that has just GOT to get fixed. Security; maintainability; simplicity > performance; or rather, those are worth some performance degradation.
• adolph 1y ago
  Another example of a new OS developed by a vendor is DryOS by Canon [0] as a replacement for WindRiver VxWorks[1]. It has been extensively explore by the chdk community of custom software extensions for Canon cameras. It appears to have some compatibility with Linux in some form. In my non-expert mind, an OS for "foveated rendering" would be similar to what many cameras prioritize and more likely be similar to an "realtime OS" of some sort. OTOH, Apple's goggles use the XNU kernel, so maybe a microkernel would be sufficiently realtime, similar to QNX often used for automotive applications [4]. 0. https://web.archive.org/web/20190214134247/http://www.canon.com/technology/now/element/cp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190214134247/http://www.canon.... 1. https://www.windriver.com/ https://www.windriver.com/ 2. https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/For_Developers https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/For_Developers 3. https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX
  • msgodel 1y ago
    Microkernels are normally pretty slow. It takes a lot of extra effort to make them fast. Realistically there's no reason Linux wouldn't be fine on its own for AR and in fact I'm typing this on Linux on some AR glasses right now.
• GeorgeTirebiter 1y ago
  The XROS thing sounds sort of like the PenPoint OS -- which was used with the EO 440 and EO 880 tablet + Cellphone-connected computers that came out around the same time as Newton (early 90s) - but with larger screens and cellular voice/data/fax connectivity (optional). Their tagline was "The Pen is the Point". Besides having a WACOM tablet as the pen-input device (requiring a driver), and baking in the notion that (at that time was true): connectivity was sporadic, and therefore you had to be opportunistic when you got a reliable cell signal (or were plugged into a phone jack). Those two ideas sure as heck did not require a whole new OS to support. But PenPoint built a company to market said OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS?useskin=vector Interestingly, this company ended up being folded into EO itself, as there seemed to be no market for a pen-based OS. The EOs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EO_Personal_Communicator?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EO_Personal_Communicator?usesk... used the AT&T Hobbit chipset, which was a descendant from the CRISP architecture. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/30350.30385 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/30350.30385 by Dave Ditzel et al. The architecture was informed by examining millions of lines of unix C code; the arch was an attempt to execute C code well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Hobbit?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Hobbit?useskin=vector It was a beautiful overall design. The design focused on fast instruction decoding, indexed array access, and procedure calls. The 32-bit architecture of Hobbit was well-suited to portable computing, and almost ended up in the Apple Newton. The manual is possibly worth a peruse: http://www.bitsavers.org/components/att/hobbit/ATT92010_Hobbit_Programmers_Reference_Jan93.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/components/att/hobbit/ATT92010_Hobb...
  • GeorgeTirebiter 1y ago
    There is another doomed project that XROS reminds me of: the Apple "Pink" OS. Brief history: https://lowendmac.com/2014/pink-apples-first-stab-at-a-modern-operating-system/ https://lowendmac.com/2014/pink-apples-first-stab-at-a-moder... "Pink was spun out as Taligent. The kernel was jettisoned. Taligent would run on top of an operating system and act as an object oriented system (like OpenStep). It was released in 1995, but it sold poorly. It was canceled altogether in 1998." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent?useskin=vector more history http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/36A61A87-064B-470D-8870-736DD59CEF48.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/36A61A87-064B-470D-88... After Apple tried Pink, Taligent, and Copeland they .... ended up using Mach / FreeBSD and some pieces from other BSDs (as I understand it). Today, we have Windows and Unix of some flavor in the main. I think Geordi LaForge was using one of these OSs on his Warp Drive computers...
• ezoe 1y ago
  > They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad Sigh... Usual company politics. No matter how much money you pour with top talents, code quality, documents etc, developing a custom OS doesn't make sense. Been there, seen that. I faced a similar situation at one company. They failed on custom Not-Invented-Here syndrome derived implementation. My technically correct skepticism was criticized for decreasing moral of the team working on it.