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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

> "A: Using our own kernel helps us get rid of the baggage of legacy codes, bring the most optimal performance on our target hardware (XR/AR/VR) and achieve more efficiency than what we would've achieved on an existing kernel."

This is kind of a non-answer, no? What baggage does it get rid of? What kind of performance optimization does it bring that cannot be fulfilled with an existing OS/kernel?

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Exactly this. The kernel seems like the least interesting part of an AR system. Also targeting x86, ARM and RISC-V for a new kernel is such a huge workload it makes no sense not to just re-use something already existing.

Targeting everything has indeed been a workload but we're trying to do the best we can! The project was initially just on x86 and we ported it to ARM in the last 3-4 months. The time it took us to port it on ARM was a fraction of what it took for us to build it on x86. Similarly, we look forward to port our OS to RISC-V even quicker and thus be ready to serve any and every use case and take up any opportunity that might present itself!

We're doing research on some new way of handling things, like why always "Everything is a file?" "The Philosophy on Unix" and other approach can be taken with optimization on mind. Figuring out the best possible ways to avoid extra memory allocation and resource allocation without degrading performance. Though we're at the early stage of this Philosophy but we're working on that. So that modern OS comes up some modern approach with optimization on mind.

We intend to plain a clearer picture with proven results of what we're doing in the coming few weeks and months. Stay tuned!

I had the same reaction! “legacy baggage” is a vague phrase. Without examples (like specific subsystems or bottlenecks), it’s hard to see how a custom kernel helps XR more than existing lightweight or RT kernels. If the team has benchmarks or case studies where Linux/Android gets in the way, that would make the argument much stronger.

We get what you're saying. The claims that we're making do indeed seem like just claims for now but we're actively working on real life benchmarks in comparison to industry standards.

Stay tuned for our Public Beta/Prototype showcase scheduled later this year!

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