How Chrome OS works upstream

Posted Sep 6, 2019 16:50 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: How Chrome OS works upstream

Thanks for the write up!

One thing that makes ChromeOS (or any other project) an actual open-source project is good documentation. Random example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=UPSTREAM+CHROMIUM+BACKPORT
Most of it is being transferred to Gerrit to enable contributions from outside Google

> They asked if in fact the Chrome OS kernel is basically the same as the upstream kernel.

Is there any real-world product that ships with absolutely zero backport and a SHA1 from Linus tree? The real question is not "if" but "how much" technical debt. That's what the tags above help measure and manage.

How Chrome OS works upstream

Posted Sep 9, 2019 11:06 UTC (Mon) by peda (subscriber, #5285) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm responsible for a couple of such (embedded) beasts. And oh what a nice place it is to be there! *Everything* is upstreamed (which was a handful of drivers plus a new subsystem actually, so it certainly wasn't a trivial process). And there is no longer any dependency on some long string of patches from the SoC vendor since they have done their part.

Which means that bisecting problems is actually possible and simple, something which I found very difficult before the SoC was sufficiently supported upstream.

It is highly recommended to seek this position!

That said, we pick a kernel from the stable tree (i.e. it has backports) when we do update, so it's not actually a SHA1 from Linus' tree. But close enough, and we could do that if we wanted to...

How Chrome OS works upstream

Posted Sep 9, 2019 12:48 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

Nice! Product names?

How Chrome OS works upstream

Posted Sep 9, 2019 15:27 UTC (Mon) by peda (subscriber, #5285) [Link]

One of them is Axentia TSE-850, which is used for encoding and adding a DARC subcarrier onto an FM transmission. Sort-of like RDS, but higher bandwidth and not at all common. You probably don't need one :-)

arch/arm/boot/dts/at91-tse850-3.dts