Google Provides Coreboot For Chromebook Pixel

Google developers committed support in Coreboot for the high-end Chromebook Pixel laptop that was announced earlier this week.

On Thursday was the announcement of the Chromebook Pixel, a $1300+ (USD) laptop beginning to ship in April that features a 1.8GHz Intel Core i5 (Dual-Core) CPU, a 12-inch display with a stunning 2560 x 1770 resolution (239 PPI), 4GB of RAM, 32GB or 64GB of solid-state storage, and an LTE connectivity option. This high-end x86 Chromebook is obviously intended for use with Google's cloud-based Chrome OS platform, but other Linux distributions will work on it.

On the same day as announcing the new laptop, Google employees already began pushing Linux kernel support for the Chromebook Pixel. Now on Friday evening was the Coreboot support for the Pixel laptop.

Interestingly, this push confirms that the Chromebook Pixel is using Google's Chrome EC (Embedded Controller). I wrote about this laptop embedded controller yesterday that was designed in-house at Google and is open-source down to the firmware. I suspected Chrome EC would be used in the Pixel based upon the timing of the code surfacing, but this Pixel push confirms that in fact the EC is this new Google-developed chip.

The Google Chromebook Pixel that ships will be running Coreboot and the open-source firmware on the EC. The code work reveals the "Link" codename for the Pixel board and other small details about the hardware, but nothing particularly exciting. The commit can be seen from Coreboot's Git viewer.