Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 2025

[ramsey]

I haven't been here in a few years, but it's good to see the project is still chugging along with regular updates. I'm back because there's a new ARM Chromebook that looks like a great platform for running archlinuxarm. I'd like to get one and run ArchLinuxARM on it. As the title of the post suggests, it's the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 with the 3nm mt8196 MediaTek processor running 8 big cores with 16GBs of RAM.

I went to see a display model yesterday, but unfortunately they didn't have one in stock. I'll probably purchase one today or tomorrow online, and it seems it could be delivered this week. I've already ordered two Suzy Q's from eBay and they should be here soon. If I can get it to boot on an external USB I will, but I think booting from USB has been removed from ChromeOS coreboot since the Samsung Chromebook Plus days of 2017.

That being the case, my plan is to build Arm Trusted Firmware from source, then build coreboot for aarch64 using mrchromebox.tech's build instructions as a guide. Then once I have the firmware and bootloader successfully flashed into the bios with the Suzy Q and booting, I should be ready to tackle archlinuxarm installation.

I'm mainly posting this to see if anyone else has already started this process. I searched the forum but didn't spot any posts about this chromebook. It is probably the most exciting piece of ARM hardware we will see for a while. I realize I will probably need to build or patch the linux-chromebook kernel package for this to work. I've built my own kernel a few times before, but I'm not what anyone would call an expert at it. But I'm full of enthusiasm since learning the device exists.

[ramsey]

Checkpoint 1: Hardware acquired!

This is the $749 model with touchscreen, 16gb ram, 256gb storage. Since the internal storage is not upgradable, let's do a quick disk benchmark. I'm sure everyone is interested in knowing how fast that storage is.

dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile.dat bs=1G count=32 oflag=dsync
1.2 Gb/s write speed

dd if=./testfile.dat of=/dev/null bs=1G count=32
3.2 Gb/s read speed

Not too shabby.

[ramsey]

To my surprise, the USB booting thing still seems to work. So I can work on getting a kernel to boot and still have a working Chromebook to play with in the meantime. I tried the existing linux-chromebook kernel and got a black screen on boot. Oh well, that's why I got the Suzy Qs. I'll try to connect with minicom next and see if I can figure out what is going on.

[ramsey]

minicom wasn't too helpful. No real output to work with. But I think I found what might be causing my problem. There's no file for this chromebook in /boot/dtbs/mediatek/. I see them all the way up to MT8195, but not for MT8196. It looks like the dts and dtsi for 'navi' are located here,
make_clickable_callback(MAGIC_URL_FULL, '
', 'https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/kernel/+/refs/heads/chromeos-6.6/arch/arm64/boot/dts/mediatek/', '', ' class="postlink"')

I'm not sure which sku I need yet, but under chrome://system I see platform_identity_sku 0. So maybe it's sku0.

[ramsey]

It looks like MT8196 support might be in the 6.18 kernel. I think I will wait until next week to see if rc1 has new dtbs before I try to build my own linux-navi package.