Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
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Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
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Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#2I am a hardcore Linux user. I went so far as buying Chromebooks to wipe ChromeOS and run Linux on them in the last 5 years. As of late, I have decided to leave ChromeOS alone on my new Pixelbook.
There are two reasons for that decision:
- I just love having the ability to have a pen to draw when I needed to share the screen to explain something for my friends when we talk about technical crap. ChromeOS supports the pen reasonably well with its ability to run Android apps.
- The Linux emulation layer on ChromeOS is actually very good. I can run app-get, gcc, Sublime text, Konsole and most of the apps I want to run.
I figured it is a good tradeoff between convenience and utility. I still have to do my embedded work on my desktop which has a real distro. I am very glad they are bringing the upcoming usb redirection support, so I can do embedded work on my laptop. With GPU acceleration I can play games too, fantastic!
Hardware-wise, the Chromebook Pixel has been a disaster. Every once in a while, the USB-C port just craps out completely and I had to do the SMC reset procedure for it to work again. The other day, I left the laptop battery run dry and when I plugged in to charge and tried to turn it on, the keyboard would flicker like a discotheque with nothing on the screen for like 20 minutes when it was charging up. The hardware is just inconsistent and feels flaky as heck.
But all in all, I am actually quite happy with my Pixelbook purchase. If the hardware/firmware experience could improve a bit, then it would have been a very, very good purchase despite all the hates from Youtube reviewers.
Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#3Does this mean Chromebooks have been running without HW acceleration all these years?
Or is this about something else?
Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#4Does this mean Chromebooks have been running without HW acceleration all these years? Or is this about something else?
No, the "real" ChromeOS has had acceleration all along. It is about the Chromebooks getting HW acceleration for its virtualized Linux environment when you want to run real Linux apps on it.
Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#5Does this mean Chromebooks have been running without HW acceleration all these years? Or is this about something else?
There is no so much HW acceleration required for canvas, CSS layouts and WebGL 2.0, versus OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan, Metal, DirectX 11/12 are capable of.
So I guess now they are getting big boys HW acceleration.
Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#6I am a hardcore Linux user. I went so far as buying Chromebooks to wipe ChromeOS and run Linux on them in the last 5 years. As of late, I have decided to leave ChromeOS alone on my new Pixelbook. There are two reasons for that decision: - I just love having the ability to have a pen to draw when I needed to share the screen to explain something for my friends when we talk about technical crap. ChromeOS supports the p…
So, why don't you just use Windows or Mac laptop? You'd have all the same advantages without hardware/firmware problems.
Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#7I am a hardcore Linux user. I went so far as buying Chromebooks to wipe ChromeOS and run Linux on them in the last 5 years. As of late, I have decided to leave ChromeOS alone on my new Pixelbook. There are two reasons for that decision: - I just love having the ability to have a pen to draw when I needed to share the screen to explain something for my friends when we talk about technical crap. ChromeOS supports the p…
As a Linux fanatic myself, I've been really interested in flashing a cheap Chromebook into Arch or something low resource, and using it as a super mobile workstation. I guess the only problem is, I haven't given up on my T430 from college. Upgraded parts, extended battery and dock makes for a very comfortable setup that's hard to leave.
Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#8This feature, along with the sound support, is what's gonna finally make the pixelbook a game changer for Linux desktops.
I can't wait for those, and the pixelbook 2.
Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#9As a developer of this, it's built using Virgil3D[1], which is rather interesting tech, that allows virtualized guests to get hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
It works by having the guest run a Mesa3D (Linux Userspace graphics) driver called virgl in the guest, which takes all of the OpenGL/OpenGL ES commands and send them through through Linux VirtIO[3] to the guest, where they are executed by the virglrenderer[1] application as normal OpenGL / OpenGL ES commands.
This let's you run whichever driver you want on the host, even proprietary ones. And it allows you you to do transparent OpenGL OpenGL ES translation.
Re: Pixelbook and “Nami” Chromebooks the First to Get Linux GPU Acceleration
#10I wish more Chromebooks would support Project Crostini. It would make a perfect development environment for me.