A non-inconsequential variety of new Quest 3 and 3S headsets couldn’t replace correctly this previous Christmas, leaving some customers scrambling for last-minute replacements or knee deep in assist chats on the lookout for a repair to their freshly bricked VR headsets. Now, Meta has clarified simply what transpired. And it wasn’t a buggy replace both, as beforehand thought.
Mark Rabkin, Meta Vice President of VR/MR, took to X to elucidate why some Quest customers have been left to take care of spiraling boot loops on Christmas Day, forcing Meta to pause its newest v72 software program replace and ship affected customers recent items whereas it found out the issue.
V72 is superior, we paused it for some time to make rattling positive it doesn’t contribute to the replace points. We tracked that down btw – uncommon race situation in AOSP R/W ext4 filesystem that corrupts recordsdata + a key safety patch that forestalls OS rollback. Fastened bug and upstreaming.
— Mark Rabkin (@mrabkin) January 20, 2025
Primarily, Rabkin is describing a uncommon and long-undetected bug within the learn/write (R/W) file system utilized by the Android Open Supply Challenge (AOSP)—which means it wasn’t an issue particular to Quest’s Horizon OS.
The “race situation” Rabkin refers to is a habits the place the result relies on the sequence or timing of occasions, resembling two processes accessing shared knowledge concurrently. These bugs are usually uncommon and tough to breed. The precise bug in query, which he notes is really 4 years outdated, brought on file corruption throughout updates. These updates are required at any time when a brand new Quest gadget is booted up for the primary time.
Whereas Meta launched a software program replace software final June that lets you pressure OS updates by way of a PC tether, Quest critically doesn’t enable OS rollbacks, which exacerbated the issue.
Rabkin says that after fixing the bug, Meta is now “upstreaming” the repair, contributing their answer to the broader AOSP to assist different builders keep away from related points sooner or later.
You may sideload content material with privately-distributed APKs—as with most Android gadgets—though Quest is fairly obstinate with regards to letting intrepid customers muck round with something underneath the hood, one thing that’s challenged jailbreakers up to now trying to divorce Quest from Meta companies and do issues like set up customized ROMS and mods.
On the time of this writing, there is no such thing as a extensively publicized, confirmed jailbreak for Quest 3, though there have been makes an attempt up to now. In late 2020, a crowd-funded group, which even attracted money from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, spurred on the race to jailbreak Quest 2, which, on the time, led an apparently profitable methodology.
That particular jailbreak nonetheless was ostensibly debunked, because it was claimed the main submission really used a Digital Machine (VM) to emulate a boot-unlock.
