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> and that's because the closed source Mali GPU drivers only work on a fixed kernel version: 4.4. There's an easy fix: add a fourth ChromeOS software channel (

> and that's because the closed source Mali GPU drivers only work on a fixed kernel version: 4.4. There's an easy fix: add a fourth ChromeOS software channel (currently there's stable, beta and dev) that ships an image without a GPU blob and with a modern kernel. There are plenty of users willing to disassemble, disable write-protect, flash new firmware and re-enable write-protect. Inconvenience, and disabling hardware acceleration for video decoding is a small price to pay for security.

chapill 9y ago
Why not both?.gif https://lwn.net/Articles/738225/ https://lwn.net/Articles/738225/ "It was said that everybody within ARM is in favor of solving the problem by open-sourcing ARM's driver — except for one recalcitrant high-level manager." Now would be a good opportunity to lean on that one person. Chromebooks can run mainline kernel without GPU now. It's just not ChromeOS. And you have to be able to install Arch Linux. And build/install your own kernel from source. There's just a very small fraction of a percent of ChromeOS users interested or even capable of that. https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/how-tos-and-troubleshooting/mainline-kernel-on-kevin-chromebook-plus https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/how-tos-and-troubleshoo...