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

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521 points OlympicMarmoto | 3 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.967s | source
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armchairhacker ◴[29 Aug 25 17:37 UTC] No.45067092[source]▶
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?

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1. mikepurvis ◴[29 Aug 25 21:21 UTC] No.45069530[source]▶
I think the proper comparison point here is probably what game consoles have done since the Xbox 360, which is basically run a hypervisor on the metal with the app/game and management planes in separate VMs. That gives the game a bare metal-ish experience and doesn't throw away resources on true multitasking where it isn't really needed. At the same time it still lets the console run a dashboard plus background tasks like downloading and so on.
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2. ksec ◴[31 Aug 25 03:52 UTC] No.45080232[source]▶
Hold on a sec, is that the same on PS5? I am pretty sure that wasn't the case two generations ago. Is that the norm now, running on hypervisor ?
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3. mikepurvis ◴[31 Aug 25 13:24 UTC] No.45082986[source]▶
It's been the case since the PS3: https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps5/Hypervisor