Google Is Successfully Using The Open-Source Qualcomm GL/VLK Drivers On Chromebooks

[robclark]

Is there any ARM chromebook you can actually buy and put a bare-metal custom linux install on it?

If you are comfortable with building your own kernel and not using the distro's kernel/grub/etc, it isn't too hard to put your favourite distro userspace on an arm chromebook that is in dev mode. (Enable boot from external USB drive first.. if you screw up that gives you a way to recover.) I have fedora running on one of mine for upstream work, and know others that have done similar with arch, etc.

There is also:

https://github.com/Maccraft123/Cadmium

I haven't tried cadmium myself (mostly because I already had a fedora setup when I discovered it), but I know others who have.

[sarmad]

A little bit off topic: is ChromeOS actually a Gnu/Linux distro? Why does it need a VM in order to run desktop Linux apps?

[fahrenheit]

The snapdragon chromebooks are the acer spin 513 (7c2), another acer non convertible and a future lenovo 13" chromebook duet.
The rest of the arm chromebooks are mediateks, the lenovo duet is actualy nice but has too little memory (4g) for linux usage without proper tweaking.

As for crostini (linux on a vm on cromeos) it's okayish, but you are limited to what the virgil host exposes (in the case of the duet, OGL 2.1 and GLES 3.1 if you want some gpu acceleration). What will pain you is the slow emmc disk (but 128gb of it).

As chromeos is wayland, those apps work better than xwayland apps, hidpi can be an issue.

On the android vm part, you are getting android 9 and sideloading is disabled.

[robclark]

A little bit off topic: is ChromeOS actually a Gnu/Linux distro? Why does it need a VM in order to run desktop Linux apps?

I suppose that depends a bit on how you define "gnu/linux distro".. it is basically a customized gentoo that runs a fullscreen browser (that is a bit of an over-simplification). But the linux environment is locked down (and read-only) when not in developer mode. (Unless restricted by corp/school admin policy, all chromebooks can be switched to developer mode.. in developer mode you can get a shell by opening up "crosh" (ctrl-alt-t) and typing "shell".)

The snapdragon chromebooks are the acer spin 513 (7c2), another acer non convertible and a future lenovo 13" chromebook duet.
The rest of the arm chromebooks are mediateks, the lenovo duet is actualy nice but has too little memory (4g) for linux usage without proper tweaking.

As far as currently shipping/announced things, the acer spin 513 (lazor) is 7c1, as is the hp x2 11 (coachz).. the lenovo duet 5 is 7c2. There are also some EDU devices, but I think those might only be sold directly to schools.

On the android vm part, you are getting android 9 and sideloading is disabled.

In developer mode, you have full adb access. And, I've not tried it myself, but without being in developer mode it should be possible to still have adb access from the linux vm: https://medium.com/chrome-o-xperts/i...s-86b266d6a122

[ElectricPrism]

We need open source Qualcomm firmware.

It's not right that 2 companies essentially control the entire industry the world relies on to connect to cell phone towers.

[Sonadow]

I hope Qualcomm never releases anything.

Show the world just how useless desktop Linux is on real consumer hardware without all the code, driver and documentation contributions.

[robclark]

We need open source Qualcomm firmware.

It's not right that 2 companies essentially control the entire industry the world relies on to connect to cell phone towers.

This is veering way off topic.. but that said, there is about a snowball's chance in hell that a network operator would allow a modem running unsigned user controlled fw attach to their network.

From CrOS side of things, the things we care about are that we can control/audit the way the modem is firewalled off from the rest of the application processor.

[OneTimeShot]

This is good news, but wouldn't it make more sense to just build hardware using chips from Open Source friendly companies?

[arQon]

This is good news, but wouldn't it make more sense to just build hardware using chips from Open Source friendly companies?

No. (And given your join date, how do you not already understand this, unless you're a trust fund kid?! :P)

Economies of scale and thin margins are what make Qualcomm etc the behemoths that they are. Being FOSS-friendly takes time and effort, and both of those things have significant cost. So ignoring FOSS (which you're free to reinterpret as FOSS-hostile if you want, but that's not the reality of it) is a critical part of getting to BE that successful in the first place.
Similarly, craptops and chromebooks are also a low-margin / high-volume business, so only the cheapest, shittiest, most bottom-of-the-barrel parts go into them. (I've been in projects for this stuff where I've seen people fight for - and lose - attempts to upgrade a part on an $800 product because the (MUCH) better part cost literally less than 5c more per unit, solely because of that "cost" increase, i.e. that reduction in per-unit profit).

Let's say there are 5 such components in your end product: we'll keep it simple and call that 25c per unit. You expect to sell 10M+ units per year. Congratulations: you've now made $2.5M additional profit. You spend $500K/yr on the devs for those components (often only after they already did the bulk of the work unpaid), and now you get to virtue-signal about how you're "giving back", AND still have an extra $2M around to spend on hookers and blow.

[johanb]

Yes please. Even Dolphin Emulator devs marked the Qualcomm proprietary driver as horrible and the open-source drivers as excellent.

That post is from 2013.
Also, mesa was marked as "good" and the only one listed as excellent is Nvidia.