Exynos Chromebooks

[psjbeisler]

The new Chromebooks were announced yesterday with the Exynos 5 and I am curious to know how the current state of Arch is for the Cortex-a15. I would love nothing more than to buy a nice Google/ARM book and throw Arch on it, especially with the virtualivation capabilities.

[WarheadsSE]

Get us a few, and rest assured, we'd make it happen.

[psjbeisler]

This pretty much answers it:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/g ... 4d636bec60

[sirspudd]

Yessy-no,

We know that Linux will work on the hardware, that is not really in debate. The question is whether the GLES2/EGL libraries will play nicely in a Linux userland, or whether the Lima driver has/will have support for the Mali hardware in this device.

This could be the most glorious Arch book in existence, and I for one am set to lay an egg.

[relghuar]

I have just ordered one, getting archlinux on it is my primary objective
I'll let you know how it goes...

[xenoxaos]

It's really not all that hard. The unofficial way right now is to install the 'other' distro, boot into ChromeOS, mount that partition, delete everything but the modules, firmware, and specific executables, then extract an ALARM rootfs. Acceleration is still up in the air as the X11 modules are built for an older version of X.

[psjbeisler]

So this happened: http://blogs.arm.com/software-enablemen ... hromebook/ !

[xenoxaos]

Let me go charge up my chromebook and I'll get this in the works!

[relghuar]

Well, I've managed to get arch running, mostly without problems. It's using original chromeos kernel, modules and firmware, everything else comes from http://us.mirror.archlinuxarm.org/os/od ... idx.img.gz (armv7h architecture). I'm booting it from 16GB usb stick.
Experience so far is not that bad:
X windows is running with xfce4 on an fbdev driver with no acceleration (I'm working to get xf86-video-armsoc from git.chromium.org built on latest X, though I'm not sure if it helps performace that much http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzmckw3fAQo).
Wifi connection is stable (NetworkManager with nm-applet).
Touchpad more or less working, not as smooth as in chrome, but after a little acceleration/sensitivity tweaking it's pretty comfortable, double-touch scrolling works.
Keyboard without home/end/pgup/pgdn was a p.i.t.a., I had to use xmodmap to remap AltGr-arrows and backspace.
Single-button touchpad is even worse, haven't yet figured out how to map anything to right-click (two-fingers-click not working, mouseemu doesn't pass the events correctly to virtual device, I have yet to test custom xorg.conf.d/50-touchpad.conf settings from the link above).
Power management is a bit buggy, first xfce power daemon doesn't notice adapter disconnect on fully charged battery, keeps on displaying power online and full battery (all the values in /sys/class/power_supply change correctly, acpi client also reports correct actual capacity), and second (and worse) waking from sleep doesn't work 100% - sometimes machine freezes on wake up, haven't yet figured out the exact reason. Even on successful wake there are some kernel warnings in dmesg (unbalanced enable_irq -something).
I have built custom kernel in chromium os buildroot, its modules work with stock kernel (that's how i got uinput running to play with mouseemu). I plan to make full developer image bootable from usb or sd card, that could perhaps make it easier to port drivers to newer kernel/Xorg.
I also plan to try the latest 3.7 kernel from git, there is some exynos functionality already, I'm quite curious what chromebook devices will actually work. Perhaps I'll have to dig out the device tree from chrome os kernel somehow.

Update: I forgot to ask - does anyone have an idea how (of if is it even possible) to connect to the serial console on this device? That could make hacking it quite a bit easier, but I found no info whatsoever Here are some board images http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/2404#1 - there's a lot of unpopulated pins that mostly look like flex-cable connectors. There's even 1 populated but not connected 4-pin connector, between the keyboard and sd-card slot, that looks suspicously like a miniature version of uart connector from odroid-x board... maybe it's time to pull out oscilloscope :-/

[xenoxaos]

That 4 pin connector is the speaker connector. I spent quite a long time looking for what could be serial.

I've got arm-soc built and I'm doing some testing now. Dual monitor hdmi seems to work. It is a little glitchy when enabling the other monitor, and I think it only supports mirroring. GL acceleration doesn't (AFAIK). But, I'm looking int lots of it.