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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.'"
It's the new thing, run Windows under Linux. Linux GPU virtualization is even good enough now to run AAA games in a VM. For most of what you do... browsing, social networking, viewing media, the experience is better under Linux now than Windows (e.g., you will never get an upgrade nag while watching a movie.) Not to mention Microsoft won't be spying on most of what you do, except of course for what runs in the VM. You want that to be less every month.
Dual boot is out, sandboxing Windows is in.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
you do not see much effort in reverse.
Not true, actually. Microsoft now officially supports and invests a lot of money in running Linux both under the Windows desktop and in the cloud. I would go so far as to speculate that Microsoft now has more money invested in this than the sum total of all the work that went into Wine.
But the elephant under the rug is, it's actually better to do it the other way: run Windows in a vm, that way you can keep your critical work and data entirely out of the hands of Microsoft. Microsoft knows this and now has a whole bunch of money invested in various efforts to forestall it. To be honest, it's hard to see that as a bad thing, it's the nearest thing to honest competition I have ever seen from that gang.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
It's been a couple of years, but last time I checked 3d performance and compatibility with vmplayer was vastly ahead of KVM.
A couple of years ago was exactly when GPU passthrough was under heavy development. Now there are multiple reports of success and I just don't see horror stories. I have no doubt that VMware player was way ahead at the time, I have tremendous respect for their ability to make stuff work, but they also like to wrap it in layers of cruft that you can't avoid. That's a turnoff for me, compared to KVM, which is accessible at every level, including the one I prefer which is simply the command line. I'm perfectly capable of setting up my own disk images, thanks. VMDK is completely irrelevant to me.
Most folks use KVM via virt-manager or similar, I have no data on that. They seem happy, so I am happy for them. I'm happy for you too. :) The world is a better place with VMware in it. At the very least they keep the KVM devs on their toes.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.