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

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521 points OlympicMarmoto | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | 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. raggi ◴[30 Aug 25 05:32 UTC] No.45072115[source]▶
For this use case a major one would be better models for carved up shared memory with safe/secure mappings in and out of specialized hardware like the gpu. Android uses binder for this and there are a good number of practical pains with it being shoved into that shape. Some other teams at Google doing similar stuff at least briefly had a path with another kernel module to expose a lot more and it apparently enabled them to fix a lot of problems with contention and so on. So it’s possible to solve this kind of stuff, just painful to be missing the primitives.