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Chromebooks May Get Apple Boot Camp-Like Windows 10 Dual Boot With 'Campfire' (xda-developers.com)
Google is reportedly working on a secret project to get Windows 10 running on Chromebooks. XDA Developers' Kieran Miyamoto reports on the latest developments surrounding "Campfire" -- the Chromebook equivalent of Apple's Boot Camp. From the report: Earlier this year, a mysterious project appeared on the Chromium Git. The Chrome OS developers had created a new firmware branch of the Google Pixelbook called eve-campfire and were working on a new "Alt OS mode" for this branch. We have since confirmed this Alt OS refers to Microsoft Windows 10 and found evidence that it wasn't just an internal project but intended for public release.
The developers have reworked the way in which they distribute updates to a rarely-used section of ROM on Chromebooks called RW_LEGACY. The RW_LEGACY section on a Chromebook's ROM traditionally gives users the ability to dual-boot into an alternative OS, but it is something of an afterthought during production and the section is rarely updated after a device leaves the factory. Now, with Campfire, Google will push signed updates to RW_LEGACY via the regular auto-update process, so firmware flashing won't be a concern for Joe Public. A recent commit for enabling Alt OS through crosh with a simple [alt_os enable] command indicates that it will be a fairly easy setup process from the user's end too. We may expect to see the first demo of "Campfire" at Google's upcoming Pixel 3 launch event in October. Also, the report notes that the Google Pixelbook won't be the only Chromebook with Campfire support, citing "mentions of multiple 'campfire variants.'"
The developers have reworked the way in which they distribute updates to a rarely-used section of ROM on Chromebooks called RW_LEGACY. The RW_LEGACY section on a Chromebook's ROM traditionally gives users the ability to dual-boot into an alternative OS, but it is something of an afterthought during production and the section is rarely updated after a device leaves the factory. Now, with Campfire, Google will push signed updates to RW_LEGACY via the regular auto-update process, so firmware flashing won't be a concern for Joe Public. A recent commit for enabling Alt OS through crosh with a simple [alt_os enable] command indicates that it will be a fairly easy setup process from the user's end too. We may expect to see the first demo of "Campfire" at Google's upcoming Pixel 3 launch event in October. Also, the report notes that the Google Pixelbook won't be the only Chromebook with Campfire support, citing "mentions of multiple 'campfire variants.'"
When they first came out they came with Linux and they were an absolute revelation. Small fast and perfect for mobile computing for people who weren't tied down to the Windows ecosystem. Then Microsoft leveraged their ability to charge whatever they wanted for Windows licenses to "encourage" vendors to dump Linux and ship a handicapped version of Windows instead. Once that handicapped version of Windows became standard, Microsoft started dictating hardware specifications and as a result we were stuck with shitty atom processors, tiny amounts of ram, and tiny hard drives for many more years than necessary going with the pace of technology. NetBooks went from being a great mobile PC option into just a shitty small laptop that you bought for your kid to wreck.
I was the original alpha tester for Windows 10 on Bay Trail Chromebooks, and the first implementation was absolutely hideous. Windows To Go technically worked then, but it took minutes of disk thrashing to do anything because Bay Trail has some serious design flaws that slow down both USB and SD transfers enormously (though for different reasons). Once it got to the point where it would run natively from the eMMC, things got quite a bit more usable, but while it is possible to get Windows 10 up and running on a 16 GB eMMC, there isn't enough space for maintenance of any sort. This meant moving things out to a flash drive and symlinking all over. I actually had it working for a few months that way, but then of course a major feature update broke it. 32 GB would actually be adequate for the OS, and everything else can go onto a flash drive without symlinking.
Bay Trail (N28xx and N29xx Celerons) was shipped half-baked by Intel rather than miss deadlines. They couldn't get the SD card I/O to work reliably above 25 MB/s, so they just hacked it so it can't even try. Too many simultaneous calls to a USB drive can start blocking each other, dropping transfer speeds into the single digit kilobytes per second range. This wasn't particularly a Chromebook problem, it was all Bay Fail devices (except those that added chips to work around the problems).
Ultimately I sold it, and bought a Haswell Chromebook instead.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
What linux virtualization solution would you recommend for hosting Win10 + games with gpu virtualization?
I haven't tried it myself yet, but there are multiple reports of success with Ryzen+KVM+GPU+W10, for example this one.
You say its 'good enough' to run AAA games. What sort of performance hit am I really facing?
My impression is, very little. GPU virtualization gives the guest OS direct access to PCI registers, the overhead can get very close to zero. This report from 2014 shows overhead consistently less than 3%, often a lot less, and remarkably, sometimes actually faster in the VM. I'm not sure how that last one works.
The big overhead for VMs tends not to be CPU, but memory consumption, make sure you have enough to make both host and guest comfortable. You should be fine with 16 GB, but more memory is always better, I'm liking how it feels with 32 GB. You will want a separate SSD for Windows, I think, but that's not going to break the bank.
Do some games "just-not-work" What sort of stability loss am i looking at?
Again, I'm not doing it myself right now (I have too many unplayed games already without a bunch more from Windows) but I see multiple reports of success with GTA 5 and I don't see any horror stories. My feeling is, your system as a whole will be more stable than it is now, and the VM+Windows part of it will be exactly as stable as now.
I've got an i7 and a gtx1080, if that's a factor.
Though I am a newly-minted Ryzen fanboy, I love Intel too except for their business practices. VM stability seems exactly the same for Intel and AMD. That is very cool. Number of VM crashes I had over the years on Intel or AMD: exactly zero, and I really thrash those VMs.
What's the situation with multi-monitor support with something like this?
Dunno. I'm waiting for your report. The question you ought to ask is, what's the situation with sharing the GPU between host and guest? Lots of active discussion on it. It's a thing, and multi-monitor passthrough is a thing.
And peripheral pass through? (usb headsets, usb controllers).
KVM has good USB passthrough, but for mouse and audio where performance is not an issue you probably want the virtual devices. There are a whole pile of online resources on it, e.g. here and the community is active. Mostly people seem to be using libvirt and virt-manager. I don't, I just read the man page and run KVM/QEMU from the command line. Do that only if you enjoy that kind of thing.
There is a great and supportive community here.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.