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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: 0.231s | 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. lstodd ◴[30 Aug 25 11:35 UTC] No.45073789[source]▶
heh, in mid-2000s all I had were a batch of misbehaving SATA controllers under freebsd, and an (actually quite well-written core of a) linux driver was all I had to work with.

Without that, we would have probably just switched hw, because the quite obscure bug was in the ASIC, and debugging that on 2005-6-ish hw is just infeasible.