Booted mainline kernel on Chromebook

Olof Johannson wrote on Google+ how to get mainline kernel booting on Samsung ARM Chromebook. As mine returned from repair with new speakers and bottom cover I decided to take a look.

With chainloaded U-Boot and just standard “exynos_defconfig” build of 3.11-rc2 I got my machine booting to Ubuntu right away:

00:06 hrw@krolik:~$ cat /proc/device-tree/model ;echo
Google Snow
00:06 hrw@krolik:~$ uname -snrp
Linux krolik 3.11.0-rc2 armv7l

There are some things missing (audio, usb 3.0, backlight and more) but even with what is available we can boot and use Chromebook with mainline kernel instead of ChromeOS one.

I will revert to 3.4-chromeos for now and try 3.8-chromeos one but that’s because I use Chromebook as developer machine for some builds where storage speed matters.

chromebook development kernel linux ubuntu