Google Designs Its Own Chrome Embedded Controller

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Designs Its Own Chrome Embedded Controller

Google engineers working on Chrome hardware have designed their own Embedded Controller (EC) that appears like it will end up in actual PCs and is open-source down to the firmware...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMwOTY

[mendieta]

Phoronix: Google Designs Its Own Chrome Embedded Controller

Google engineers working on Chrome hardware have designed their own Embedded Controller (EC) that appears like it will end up in actual PCs and is open-source down to the firmware...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMwOTY

This is all great. But does any of you own a Chromebook? It is a b!tch, seriously, to boot any other OS. I thought of having a dual boot with Chrubuntu, but you need to get into developer mode. wait for a long time for a warning disappear, the whole experience is aggravating, not to mention you lose EVERYTHING in your chromeOS partition.

So much for their openness!

http://liliputing.com/2012/11/how-to...hromebook.html

[ethana2]

This is all great. But does any of you own a Chromebook? It is a b!tch, seriously, to boot any other OS. I thought of having a dual boot with Chrubuntu, but you need to get into developer mode. wait for a long time for a warning disappear, the whole experience is aggravating, not to mention you lose EVERYTHING in your chromeOS partition.

So much for their openness!

http://liliputing.com/2012/11/how-to...hromebook.html

I always do backups before installing a new OS anyways, so, I really don't care. I installed Ubuntu Touch Preview on my Nexus 10, and I'm seriously considering the ChromeBook Pixel. I'd be unlocking, wiping, and installing Ubuntu the first day I had it. I can deal with a little bit of work to do it, I'm just worried about whether 32GB would be enough to play Steam Games on or whether I could use an external hard drive for Steam games.. I don't want the 64GB because I don't want LTE.

[chenxiaolong]

I always do backups before installing a new OS anyways, so, I really don't care. I installed Ubuntu Touch Preview on my Nexus 10, and I'm seriously considering the ChromeBook Pixel. I'd be unlocking, wiping, and installing Ubuntu the first day I had it. I can deal with a little bit of work to do it, I'm just worried about whether 32GB would be enough to play Steam Games on or whether I could use an external hard drive for Steam games.. I don't want the 64GB because I don't want LTE.

I'm wondering how one would use the keyboard in any other distro or OS. In Ubuntu, how would you open the dash without a super/windows key? Or how would you switch to a TTY using Control + Alt + F# without the F# keys when something like Xorg breaks?

I really like the hardware, but I don't know if the keyboard is very useful in OS's other than ChromeOS.

[curaga]

Ah, finally! I surely won't be missing "acpi error: EC storm detected" messages from a buggy EC. Now put this in all laptops.

I wonder if it can be flashed by users?

@chenxiaolong

You can map keys how you like. Some of the special keys to F keys for example. Or even mouse buttons if you want, I think I had F12 mapped to the right mouse button on a macbook (with only a single-button trackpad key).

[0xBADCODE]

Sounds nice. But let's see: Google included DRM restictions in recent Chrome OS. And they also try to impose vendor lock-in by aggressively pushing their services in ways which are not relly compatible with anything else. So, they say "don't be evil"? They still getting evil with all this DRM stuff in chrome OS, lock-ins, etc.

...and BTW it's Google who is behind DRM specs for HTML5 in W3C. So we can get locked-down web soon. And Google will be "credited" for this bastardization of the web as well.

[przemoli]

Good move.

Now OEM's need to adopt it or it will be just "good but too rare to matter". :|

Or even very good, since its not often wen we see someone treating firmware as NOT AN STATE (business) SECRET.

[runeks]

This is all great. But does any of you own a Chromebook? It is a b!tch, seriously, to boot any other OS. I thought of having a dual boot with Chrubuntu, but you need to get into developer mode. wait for a long time for a warning disappear, the whole experience is aggravating, not to mention you lose EVERYTHING in your chromeOS partition.

So much for their openness!

http://liliputing.com/2012/11/how-to...hromebook.html

On my ARM Chromebook I can press Ctrl+D to skip the warning. I understand why the warning is there though. Without it, the secure boot process wouldn't work.

Also, nothing was wiped from my Chromebook's SSD when installing Chrubuntu (via the script). I though the installation process was quite smooth actually. Run script once, reboot, run it again, reboot into Ubuntu.

I'm wondering how one would use the keyboard in any other distro or OS. In Ubuntu, how would you open the dash without a super/windows key? Or how would you switch to a TTY using Control + Alt + F# without the F# keys when something like Xorg breaks?

I really like the hardware, but I don't know if the keyboard is very useful in OS's other than ChromeOS.

The "search" key on my Chromebook works as the "super" key and opens the dash. Also, the top row keys are not labelled F-keys, but actually work as such. For example, Ctrl+Alt+<Left Arrow> is equivalent to Ctrl+Alt+F1 and gets me to VT1. I got used to it pretty quickly.

That being said, the X drivers for the Mali-T604 are crap, so there's no 2D acceleration, or rather, it's actually *slower* than software acceleration. But all it takes is someone knowledgeable to create a good EXA driver.

[chenxiaolong]

Ah, finally! I surely won't be missing "acpi error: EC storm detected" messages from a buggy EC. Now put this in all laptops.

I wonder if it can be flashed by users?

@chenxiaolong

You can map keys how you like. Some of the special keys to F keys for example. Or even mouse buttons if you want, I think I had F12 mapped to the right mouse button on a macbook (with only a single-button trackpad key).

Thanks for the info! I was not aware that you could do that

[chenxiaolong]

The "search" key on my Chromebook works as the "super" key and opens the dash. Also, the top row keys are not labelled F-keys, but actually work as such. For example, Ctrl+Alt+<Left Arrow> is equivalent to Ctrl+Alt+F1 and gets me to VT1. I got used to it pretty quickly.

That being said, the X drivers for the Mali-T604 are crap, so there's no 2D acceleration, or rather, it's actually *slower* than software acceleration. But all it takes is someone knowledgeable to create a good EXA driver.

That's good to know. (well, except for the fact that the Pixel only has 10 top row keys :P)

I don't think there will be any issues with the X drivers on the Pixel. It's uses the Intel HD4000.