37C3 - Turning Chromebooks into regular laptops

media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11929-tur...
With the power of open source!
Deep dive into (ex)ChromeOS hardware from developer's perspective.
In this talk you will learn how ChromeOS hardware designed by Google and it's board partners differ from regular laptops/desktops.
We'll go over Coreboot development (+guide of porting it to other x86 motherboards!), EDK2 (UEFI payload we use in our firmware builds) and what it takes to make mainline Linux run on these machines.
This talk will involve ACPI tables, I2C and SPI interfaces, DSP firmware and maintenance of audio stack that differs from (almost) all x86 machines in the market.
We'll present challenges we've faced during the development cycle, tips on how to avoid pitfalls, and our plans for the future :)
elly
sdomi
events.ccc.de/congress/2023/h...
#37c3 #HardwareMaking

[@delibellus]

awesome presentation by 100gecs

[@baggern]

It's 100 gecs!

[@Gzuz187]

lmfaooooo i get what u mean

[@juneegbert3650]

new little witch academia looks great!

[@theod0r]

holy shit

[@makak_zeleny]

FEEL SO CLEEEAN LIKE A MONEY MACHIIINE

[@vonmakeheat]

i will tell my children , your comment open my eyes just like weed did the first time i smoked .... i really thought the 100 gecs was these guys . i like the 100gecs now. i love you !!!!!

[@mrsurpris3]

Amazing! Not a big fan of Cyberpunk, but the fact that you managed to run this piece of code on a "shitbook" deserves that standing ovations! Less ewaste more open source!

[@symbioin]

Please continue in the same spirit as your passion and knowledge made the presentation both enjoyable and enlightening. Once again, thank you for your hard work and commitment to delivering such high-quality content 🥰

[@djmips]

I always wondered about this! Very cool - thx elly and domi

[@BabiIak]

Such a hell of an informative presentation. Thank you.

[@petermuller608]

Great presentation!

[@DavidBerglund]

Great project! This talk inspired me to purchase a used Chromebook.

[@kelownatechkid]

Very impressive work! I struggled with audio so much on a hacked chromebook lol

[@joana6048]

i struggled with mine too, the speakers are working but gave up on having the jack working

[@Morimea]

8:40 "Google publish code because they obligated to" - interesting to see that people still can tell truth about corporations behavior "we are the people who doing those thinks" - yep corporations use opensource as free code-power 20:24 - "its not foss" - crazy to see someone actually saying that firmware is not open, usually no one talk about it actual hacking - nice to see amazing video

[@EdouardTavinor]

google has created and supports a huge amount of open-source and free-software projects.

[@Username-2]

@@EdouardTavinorEntirely for their own benefit and profit.

[@MordiJC]

coreboot would cease to exist without Google. All vendors want to use their proprietary implementations with EDK2. Everything that can be public in ChromeOS is public. Not everything can be published or upstreamed. Vendors tend to force NDA and prohibit to publish anything if not pressed. Also time-to-market leads to poor code quality like in case of kernel patches with [CHROMIUM] tag in CrOS repo. Also SDK (chroot) is being migrated to Bazel. It should make working on firmware easier.

[@mark6302]

jesus christ these two are freaking brilliant

[@BakedAndAwakePodcast]

Underrated observation 👍🏽

[@thorbjorn.nielsen]

Great work! Thanks for sharing

[@olokelo]

Awesome talk!

[@sfdntk]

What an awesome presentation, well done

[@SynthfulDuck]

This should've existed a couple of years ago when redditors were buying huge amounts of raspberry pis and wasting silicon on stupid emulation boxes.

[@dwaynearthur1476]

love your Presentation!!!!!!!!!

[@MCasterAnd]

I have always wondered what will happen once Google decides to randomly discontinue chromebooks... becuase we all know that will happen, and it will come out of the blue.

[@EdouardTavinor]

I don't see why. ChromiumOS is 100% open-source. I think that works out of the box on a lot if not all chromebooks. Also i find google's support to be rather good, compared with other big tech companies. For example in google chat i still have all my chat messages going back more than 10 years.

[@DavidBerglund]

Have a hard time believing that will happen just out of the blue with it being such a popular product. It was the most popular laptop for schools in the US according to numbers I saw last year. Probably still true. For many other Google products, I agree that it feels like a coin toss if it's going to still be around the next day.

[@TracyClark-cv3wh]

@@EdouardTavinor Yeah, you & Google have them.

[@icantseethis]

This has been doable for a while - shout out to MrChromebox!!!

[@robot_madness3164]

38:54 would asahilinux's speakersafetyd be useful for these chromebooks? edit: saw the q:a segment

[@adroitspartan7907]

Great video, thx

[@joana6048]

I've been using an Acer CB311-9H as my laptop, i got it second hand for cheap and replaced chromeOS by devuan right away (later switched to artix), if you are planning on using it for some light web development and reading documents, 4GB of RAM and two celeron cores is pretty much enough. It's battery life is what i adore the most, 8-11 hours of actually active use! The biggest downside is the reduced storage (only 32GB), my model has a microsd slot but I've had bad experiences with microsd cards so i rarely use them for storing data

[@roberto4898]

Love this project

[@blu3h4t]

Had pretty funny experience yesterday met the presenter in a bus on the way to fosdem :D

[@igorschmidlapp6987]

We used to make Linux laptops with old "netbooks"... Yeah, I'm old.... ;-)

[@blinddarm8478]

Very nice talk! Both have very strong accents, ellyq's is very hard to understand and listen to. To all those struggleing like me, turn on the auto auto subtitles, it helps a little. Seems like AI is better at understanding accents these days then me :D

[@bmflinux]

No link to the project?

[@xvsun]

RIP to my ARM Chromebook which I thought I could swap OS. Well it's a good multimedia device.g

[@elly3713]

Well, you can, assuming it's: -RK3399 -MT8183 -MT8192 -MT8195 RK3399 is well supported, we're working on MT8183, while Angelo and Nicolas from Collabora are working on MT8192 and MT8195. It's already usable for developers, but it will probably take us a few months until we can ship something that can be used by regular users :)

[@kiyoshimatsutsuyu1931]

try windows on arm ;p

[@owenshotspot]

Who says you can't:)

[@xvsun]

@@elly3713 That's awesome! Well I got the Snapdragon 7c. Lenovo Ideapad Duet 5. Great OLED display - performance is decent. Idk if it's a completely different problem to support this chip. I know there was a project which supported my Chromebook but we'll see what the future will bring. Good luck in the development!

[@RedSaint83]

"/(sorry|yes)/, we're on discord" 😆

[@tuttocrafting]

Me watching this on a C720P with MrChromebox FW on it....

[@schnoe1875]

but can it run far cry ???

[@ingusmant]

Is there a list of these moddable chromebooks? Link me chummers

[@28holes]

Is this 100 gecs?

[@duedman-alleswasknallt5775]

I found it quite difficult to understand her most of the time

[@tandoori8597]

subtitles are available and make it easier

[@LiEnby]

Ok this is funny chromeOS is the most locked down shit ever but then the hardware is more open than your PC

[@MordiJC]

I cannot agree with your statement. You can build whole ChromiumOS yourself from public repo. Firmware is trickier because vendors do not want to publish anything really. ChromeOS (not ChromiumOS) is closed in many aspects due to proprietary code and due to security concerns. You wouldn't want someone to build ChromeOS signed with production keys only to embed some malicious code in the OS and you wouldn't even notice that.

[@xfox360]

talk is a bit hard to listen to. Not because of their accents, but because of the audio quality. Sure, C3VOC only uses the audio gear the CCH provides, but isnt there a better solution?

[@TheVifino]

CCH staff did the audio mixing, we weren't allowed to.

[@MCasterAnd]

It really seems like they have an "audience mic" which is permanently turned on, picking up all the room noise. It's probably there to pick up audience clapping etc. I can hardly believe that the mic they are using would pick up this much room noise. It would be great if they could just turn this mic off.

[@mad_circuits]

Why bother firmware updates? Pah, I fix it myself. 😂

[@yeetyeet7070]

nice talk, but even nicer accents

[@ryshellso526]

Lmfao, you can boot into a different linux system from a chromebook, been doing it for years to get into kali and bootup my wifi scanning. ;)

[@BakedAndAwakePodcast]

They’re taking this much further than we did with dual boot finagling, I’m sure you understand that

[@ElDaumo]

⁠@@BakedAndAwakePodcastof course he does. he uses kali…

[@himselfe]

...

[@el7440]

lacking good docs a tale as old as time

[@Yautjaprime]

ttd

[@oldexe7035]

"shitbooks" powned!

[@nilzthorbo5437]

wtf this is hard to listen to

[@NullUndefined1337]

a little bit clearer speech would be appreciated thx ;)

[@sfdntk]

The speech was perfectly clear for me, great audio quality and both presenters had great diction and a solid grasp of the language. The auto-generated subtitles are fairly accurate too; it had trouble capturing proper nouns like the names of various software packages, but if you're struggling to understand the presenters' accents the subtitles will probably help a lot nevertheless.

[@Jujukungfu]

Might be easier to watch with subtitles mate

[@blockbertus]

@@sfdntk Elly mumbled a lot and is hard to listen to.

[@gonzalez83]

The guy with the long hair was really hard to understand

[@Nitro2048]

​​@@gonzalez83You can turn subtitles on if you dont understand what she's saying. It was fine from my side to understand them both. Its probably since i grew up on similar english speaking people like them

[@mojoblues66]

I stopped watching after slide #12 "Every different laptop has different quirks" I appreciate you guys work but this kind of hard fragmention is just frustrating.

[@S1lentSt0rm]

WTB English version of this