Meta defined the particular technical motive that some Quest headsets have been bricked late final month.
In the event you missed it, in December some Quest headsets, mostly Quest 2 headsets, stopped booting efficiently, getting caught in what’s often called a “boot loop”. The problem occurred after an computerized firmware replace for headsets which hadn’t been up to date in a very long time, the place the distinction between the beforehand put in model and the newest replace was vital.
By the top of the month, Meta had acknowledged the difficulty and advised prospects “most often, you at the moment are in a position to make use of your system usually”. For units bricked, the corporate began providing free replacements, even out of guarantee.
Meta Replaces Some Quests After Rendering Them ‘Unresponsive’
Meta is changing some Quests after headset homeowners mentioned they discovered bricks of their arms round Christmastime.
Now, three weeks later, Meta’s VP of Quest and Horizon OS Mark Rabkin is detailing precisely what occurred.
Rabkin says the difficulty was a “uncommon race situation in AOSP R/W ext4 filesystem that corrupts information + a key safety patch that forestalls OS rollback”, saying that the bug has been there for 4 years however hasn’t been a difficulty till December. Additional, in response to Rabkin, a safety patch prevented the OS from rolling again to a working model.
Bug’s been in there 4 years however by no means been hit by us earlier than Dec 🤷♂️. Race circumstances are ouch.
— Mark Rabkin (@mrabkin) January 20, 2025
AOSP is the Android Open Supply Venture, the open-source core of Meta’s Horizon OS that runs on Quest headsets, ext4 is the Linux file system that Android makes use of, and R/W refers to studying and writing from the file system on the identical time. A race situation is a matter which might happen in multithreaded software program when completely different elements of the code operating alongside one another execute in an sudden order, resulting in an unanticipated end result.
Basically, Rabkin is claiming {that a} bug in how Android’s file system handles studying and writing on the identical time in a really particular and uncommon situation triggered the difficulty, and a safety patch supposed to forestall rolling again to the earlier OS model left this defective replace in place.
Meta Servers Damaged, All Quest Headsets Unusuable
Meta’s servers weren’t working appropriately earlier at this time, and the difficulty rendered all Quest headsets quickly unusable.
It is the newest in a historical past of outages from Meta, and for these affected, much more critical than any previous situation. Again in 2018 each Oculus Rift stopped working as a consequence of an expired certificates. That drawback took Meta (then Fb) greater than 12 hours to repair. Extra lately, each internet-connected Quest headset stopped working for round an hour in March 2024 as a consequence of a server error, resulting in Meta vowing to make Quest headsets “extra resilient” to server points going ahead.
The bootloader of shopper Quest headsets is locked, that means you may’t manually flash a customized working system, and Meta would not help you downgrade to an older Horizon OS model both. These choices depart the units susceptible to a difficulty like this, despite the fact that the circumstances wanted for one to come up are exceedingly uncommon. To be seen as a critical shopper electronics firm on par with Apple, Meta might should rethink a few of its insurance policies on software program updates, and construct up the form of belief that’s considerably eroded by being left with a brick on Christmas day.
