Google Introduces Freon, a Replacement For X11 On Chrome OS

An anonymous reader writes With this week's release of Chrome OS M41, there is the new Freon graphics stack to replace X11 on some platforms. Freon is a very limited graphics stack to replace Chrome OS usage of X11/X.Org by having the Chrome browser communicate directly with the Linux kernel's KMS/DRM API and OpenGL ES interfaces for drawing. This design is much simpler and yields various power and performance improvements though it's not based on Wayland nor Mir (though Chrome plans to support these display server models).

Comments

DRM stands for

[tepples]

Here I'm assuming that "KMS/DRM" refers to "kernel mode setting and direct rendering manager", not anything to do with "digital restrictions management" such as establishing a protected video path for use with the Content Decryption Module draft stuff in HTML5.

The Browser is NOT the OS

[duckintheface]

Marketing gibberish aside, the Chrome browser is not the OS. The OS also happens to be called Chrome but it is just a variant of Linux. And the Chrome browser is a browser, not an operating system. Google wants to limit your applications to those that run in the browser to sort of simulate the "browser is the OS" look and feel, but that's not really what's going on. The confusion is intentional.