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

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520 points OlympicMarmoto | 3 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jnwatson ◴[29 Aug 25 17:46 UTC] No.45067216[source]▶
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.

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tanvach ◴[29 Aug 25 18:09 UTC] No.45067491[source]▶
Yeah reverse engineering all the drivers is going to be a huge headache.
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markus_zhang ◴[29 Aug 25 22:00 UTC] No.45069918[source]▶
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.

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1. toast0 ◴[29 Aug 25 23:08 UTC] No.45070420{3}[source]▶
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

[2] https://osdev.wiki/wiki/Multiboot1_Bare_Bones

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2. markus_zhang ◴[29 Aug 25 23:29 UTC] No.45070553[source]▶
Thanks. I got all the resources covered. But I don’t have the energy to work on them as a side project any more. Alas! I wasted my younger days and hope you fare better!
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3. saagarjha ◴[30 Aug 25 09:38 UTC] No.45073294[source]▶
Unfortunately, you are unlikely to be able to jump into just being paid to write an OS with no experience.