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

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520 points OlympicMarmoto | 1 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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1. leoc ◴[30 Aug 25 01:14 UTC] No.45071086[source]▶
My hunch is that for nearly anyone who is serious about it these days, the way forward is either to have unusually tight control over the underlying platform, or to include a servant Linux installation with your OS. If Windows is a buggy set of device drivers, then Linux is a free set of buggy device drivers. If you're happy with your OS running as a client of a Linux hypervisor indefinitely then you could go for that; otherwise you'd have to try to gradually move bits of the hardware support into your OS over time—ideally faster than new Linux dependencies arise...