Google Does A Good Job Sticking Close To Upstream For Their Linux Kernels On Chromebooks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Does A Good Job Sticking Close To Upstream For Their Linux Kernels On Chromebooks

For those wondering how Google manages the Linux kernel sources they use for shipping on the dozens of different Chromebooks and maintaining the support for the respective cycles, Douglas Anderson of Google presented at last week's Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego on the matter...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chromebook-Linux-Kernels

[uid313]

What firmware does Chromebook run on?
If it is open source, then maybe that is the most interesting thing about Chromebooks, then you buy a Chromebook and maybe can uninstall Chrome OS and install Ubuntu or Fedora.

[pgeorgi]

What firmware does Chromebook run on?
If it is open source, then maybe that is the most interesting thing about Chromebooks, then you buy a Chromebook and maybe can uninstall Chrome OS and install Ubuntu or Fedora.

It's coreboot based, there are often some binary only components, but it's possible to integrate them in your own builds. Usually no firmware signature checks (except on some recent Dell model, maybe), so you can also install these builds.

If you're not into building yourself, https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices provides some prepared and tested options. This is essentially a coreboot distro.

[ThoreauHD]

I wish they'd upstream some of these drivers to the main kernel. It's a tale of two cities for sound, touchpad, keyboard support. But that's not google's fault. That intel selling driverless shitboxes.

They are both misleading customers into thinking it's just vanilla linux on these devices. It ain't. Every third reddit post is some dipshit nuking his emmc drive and wondering why nothing works.

[microcode]

I wish they'd upstream some of these drivers to the main kernel. It's a tale of two cities for sound, touchpad, keyboard support. But that's not google's fault. That intel selling driverless shitboxes.

They are both misleading customers into thinking it's just vanilla linux on these devices. It ain't. Every third reddit post is some dipshit nuking his emmc drive and wondering why nothing works.

Well, all the kernel trees are there. If there's an EC driver in the diff, you know in probably wasn't there in the upstream at the start of the year.

It does seem a bit unnecessary to me how many minor non-functional differences exist between swaths of devices with identical features and performance.

[starshipeleven]

What firmware does Chromebook run on?
If it is open source, then maybe that is the most interesting thing about Chromebooks, then you buy a Chromebook and maybe can uninstall Chrome OS and install Ubuntu or Fedora.

As said by someone else it's Coreboot and you can usually install the seaboot payload (legacy BIOS boot, can load only Linux at least on chromebooks I've seen), or even full UEFI payload so you can boot Windows too.

It's shitty low-end hardware on average, many devices have soldered eMMC and RAM, and their keyboard or touchpad may or may not work correctly without patching stuff in userspace (hence why there is a distro for chromebooks, that is a Ubuntu respin called GalliumOS) and the reflashing process isn't istantaneous, you usually need to disassemble the device to remove a screw or something else that is closing a contact to keep the firmware read only.

All in all, it's usually better to buy another random low-end shit "netbook-but-not-called-like-that" device.

If you buy a chromebook you buy it for running ChromeOS and Android apps on a device that isn't a shitty mobile, hacking them is not a terribly efficient choice.

[andyprough]

*Google does a good job of using Chromebooks to grab personal data on tens of millions of unsuspecting public school kids and their families in order to increase their advertising revenues"

Fixed the headline for you

[starshipeleven]

*Google does a good job of using Chromebooks to grab personal data on tens of millions of unsuspecting public school kids and their families in order to increase their advertising revenues"

Fixed the headline for you

Thats... not what the article is about.

Since we are playing the "invent fictional titles for an article" game, what about "Google is much better than Microsoft or Apple at compensating this data mining"

[pal666]

slide 9 explains why enterprise always produces shitty code. because they prefer to pile up layers of shit instead of doing subsystem cleanup

[ed31337]

I want a tablet that runs Linux proper and doesn't heat the house up. Something with a large amount of RAM (like 16GB) would be great. I love my Android tablets for being silent, energy efficient, but I can't run Qt Creator on those to do my development work and the RAM at 1GB is too tight.