Difference between revisions of "Hardware Compatibility"

Revision as of 22:52, 22 October 2016

In order to install and run GalliumOS, your ChromeOS device needs firmware with Legacy Boot capability. This feature is typically provided by SeaBIOS, and included in coreboot.

Some Chromebooks and Chromeboxes have Legacy Boot enabled in the default factory firmware. Other models require a firmware update to add or enable the feature, and unfortunately some models will not work at all.

In general, ChromeOS devices fall into categories by the core architecture of their CPU:

• Intel Haswell, Broadwell, Bay Trail, and Sandy/Ivy Bridge Chromebooks and Chromeboxes are supported by GalliumOS
• Intel Braswell models are new and mostly supported
• Intel Skylake models are new and partially supported
• Intel Pineview models are older and not supported: they do not ship with compatible firmware, and custom firmware is not presently available
• ARM models are not supported: they do not ship with compatible firmware, and custom firmware is not presently available

The table below lists all ChromeOS devices ever produced, and the vital details regarding their ability to support GalliumOS. If you find any errors or omissions, please let us know!

If you run into any issues not covered here, please check our issue tracker and submit a bug report.

3rd party firmware updates for many devices are available from several parties -- see Firmware.

Additionally, some devices can support dual-boot (GalliumOS alongside ChromeOS) either with stock firmware or with updated firmware. See chrx for more details.

^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]}

GalliumOS Support by Model

Notes

<references> ^{[1] [3] [4] [6] [5] [2] [7] [8] [11] [12] [13] [14] [9] [10]}

1. Pineview models do not ship with compatible firmware, and custom firmware is not generally available. MARIO (Google Cr-48) might be an exception. See Support/Pineview.
2. ARM models do not ship with compatible firmware, and custom firmware is not available at this time. See Support/ARM.
3. Sandy/Ivy Bridge models are supported. See Support/SandyIvy.
4. Haswell models are well-supported. See Support/Haswell.
5. Broadwell models are well-supported. See Support/Broadwell.
6. Bay Trail models are supported. See Support/BayTrail.
7. Braswell models are mostly supported. See Support/Braswell and Braswell Platform Validation.
8. Skylake models are new and preliminarily supported. We are currently working on a full Skylake build. See Support/Skylake and Skylake Platform Validation.
9. Hardware ID: Each Chromebook/box/base model is identified by a hardware ID. Some manufacturers reuse model names for different hardware IDs (e.g. Samsung), and others market several versions of the same hardware ID (e.g. HP). For purposes of support questions, hardware ID is the most important identifier for your model. You can check your Hardware ID from the Developer Mode boot screen ("OS verification is OFF"), from the Terminal (dmidecode -s system-product-name) or from inside ChromeOS by navigating to chrome://system, where it's called hardware_class.
10. Dual-Booting with ChromeOS is possible where the factory firmware supports legacy booting (SeaBIOS), or the custom firmware installs legacy boot capability without removing ChromeOS boot functionality. Currently, dual-boot setups are installed via chrx.
11. Text Mode: The factory firmware of this model fails to display text-mode output, so messages printed to screen during the early boot process will be invisible. This can be functional, but very difficult to debug if problems arise. Updated FULL ROM firmware fixes it. See Firmware.
12. HiDPI: This model has a 2560x1700 display. GalliumOS (Xfce, Gtk2, xfwm4) will work at this geometry, but GUI elements will be very small (possibly unusably small), since they are not scaled appropriately. There are some good settings and workarounds in the HiDPI Issue Tracker thread.
13. SAMUS (Google Pixel, 2015) See Installing/Samus for some notes on audio and HiDPI config.
14. PANTHER/ZAKO (ASUS Chromebox, 2014 / HP Chromebox, 2014) have a broken factory legacy boot payload that fails to initialize the USB3 ports; custom firmware is the only resolution. See also Installing/Panther.