Unable to Dual Boot ChromeBook Plus XE520QAB-K02US

[ticketcitymr]

I've followed the directions for a sd card from the archlinux site:
https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv ... ebook-plus
When I get to the os verification screen, I press CTRL-U and the screen goes black and nothing happens.
Please advise...help!

[ticketcitymr]

Purchased new SD card, but still no luck. Beuhler????

[bneumeier]

Hi ticketcitymr,

Since December 2018, the GRU image available at http://fl.us.mirror.archlinuxarm.org/os/rockchip/ has had exactly this behavior on Samsung Chromebook Plus -- see for example:

https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=13278&p=60092

https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=13279&p=60126

https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=13375&p=60350

I verified the problem still occurs with the January 2019 build, which is presumably what you're using. I haven't yet tried the current build, which was published at 04-Feb-2019 02:35.

My suspicion is that the build options being used to build the kernel package (including both the mainline kernel and the GRU 4.4 kernel) lack support for the video display for the chromebook plus, hence the black screen -- for all I know, the operating system is booting properly, but without a working display it's difficult to see any evidence of it.

As far as I can tell, nobody on this forum is interested in fixing the problem or even discussing it -- see the crickets in response to my earlier posts, linked above -- and I don't know of any source for old kernel packages that might actually work. And I don't know of any other way to solicit support for Arch Linux ARM, so as far as I can tell we are both pretty much out of luck with Arch on this hardware until something changes. It's frustrating!

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.

At some point I'm planning to look at the kernel package scripts or process and see if I can figure out how to take a cross-compiled kernel and package it so that chromebook will boot it. If I have any positive results, I'll post them in this forum.

[bneumeier]

Just as an FYI for anyone else using a Chromebook Plus -- the version of ArchLinuxARM-aarch64-chromebook-latest.tar.gz, published on 2019-03-08, works for me without issues using the installation instructions found at https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/rockchip/samsung-chromebook-plus.