Linux on Samsung Chromebook Plus (Kevin) with Rockchip RK3399 ARM SoC (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Linux on Samsung Chromebook Plus (Kevin) with Rockchip RK3399 ARM SoC (2024)

devkitsune.net

38 pointstranspute14 comments

They are unknowingly benefiting from a lot of prior work upstreaming support for the rk3399, mostly because of the pine64 pinebook pro which also uses that chipset. Any random newer ARM chipset probably wouldn't fare this well, but it's good to see that that upstreaming work is benefiting the whole community not just pine customers.

edit: Looks like one of the key people in making that happen is in this very thread! Hi Megi!

Actually, Pinebook Pro users benefited from a lot of upstreaming work done/encouraged by Google/Chromium team for these devices. Upstream support for Gru Chromebooks predates Pinebook Pro exactly by 3 years.

And I did not do much on Pinebook Pro, except for Type-C port support. ;) Greetings, to you, too.

From her blog, Alyssa did the panfrost development on a Chromebook.

I will forever be grateful to whichever googler made the call to require chromebook bootloaders to be unlockable. I could easily see it going the way of smartphones otherwise.

So many devices can now remain useful after their support ends, rather than being destined to become ewaste.

Ron Minnich, On The Metal (2020), https://archive.org/details/on-the-metal-season-1-wrap-up

  Chromebooks have nailed the, "Oh, by the way, hold down this magic key combo, and it's yours. It's your laptop now. We will put up a crazy warning screen, but then we'll boot to whatever you want to boot to."

  The deep dark secret that nobody knows about Chromebooks, and I've been trying to give talks about this for years, but people still don't know it, is you can further take that Chromebook, re-key it with your personal key, and build an operating system image which you sign with your personal key, and that Chromebook from then on will only boot your version of your operating system that you load. It won't even recognize Google's operating system as legitimate .. [but] .. there is no way back when you blow those Google keys out of your Chromebook. You're running your version of Chrome OS or whatever forever

“We believe you should be able to hack on your own property, but if you do it's not our fault if something breaks.” — https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/refer...

Thanks for the pointer to other ChromeOS devices with RK3399.

Google's Pixel phones are also this way, and the GrapheneOS project takes advantage of this feature.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240119035042/https://www.devki...

Libreboot supports these machines, which removes the ChromeOS splash screen and the linux kernel size and signing restrictions, otherwise you'll hit problems trying to install the current version of ArchLinuxARM.

There are several guides here: https://libreboot.org/docs//install/chromebooks.html

I used external flashing https://libreboot.org/docs//install/spi.html to replace the firmware because I couldn't get it to write through software. If I recall correctly the write protect is much harder to reach than the chip.

After doing the external flashing once, it is easy to update the ROM with the Chrome fork of flashrom.

Also huge shout out to Alyssa for the panfrost gpu drivers. There was a time when I was following that development very closely and it made a night/day difference to the linux experience.

Seems like the server is dead right now.

Thanks for this post. I bought this model used in 2019 and still use it daily. Beautiful screen and form factor, a real gem. The updates stopped a long time ago.

These things have upstream kernel/u-boot support, so it should be rather smooth sailing with uptodate kernel.

If you're looking for a pretty well supported ARM based Linux laptop. The Thinkpad x13s can be found for a decent price on ebay and it is powerful enough for general use.

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