The "why" here ... or at least the reason for me to flash my Chromebook BIOS and install Gallium ... was because my Chromebook went EoL by Google and I wanted to see if I can keep it going for a while.
Gallium is an amazing piece of work, and the documentation is superb, but it's starting to show that it's on a very out of date base and there's no sign of a new version for some time. The efforts seem to have slowed down, which is a shame.
It leaves me wondering if the main patches and drivers in the kernel fork could ever be merged upstream. Maybe there's some technical or legal reason why not, or maybe it's just the work required and nobody has the time.
Either way, I hope it remains possible to run old Chromebooks for a while yet! They are often decent, cheap hardware if a little slow.
Yes , there are a lot of quirks in the chrome book platform . I have a 2015 hp 11e and nothing works on it but chromeos, win7 and gallium. No Ubuntu , FreeBSD , NetBSD or red hat .
Gallium is an amazing piece of work, and the documentation is superb, but it's starting to show that it's on a very out of date base and there's no sign of a new version for some time. The efforts seem to have slowed down, which is a shame.
It leaves me wondering if the main patches and drivers in the kernel fork could ever be merged upstream. Maybe there's some technical or legal reason why not, or maybe it's just the work required and nobody has the time.
Either way, I hope it remains possible to run old Chromebooks for a while yet! They are often decent, cheap hardware if a little slow.