Anchorboot

Despite their bad reputation as walled-garden systems, ChromeOS devices have huge potential to be FOSS-friendly as most things that make them work are published as free software. However, they use custom platform firmware purpose-built to boot their operating system with non-standard boot mechanisms, whose limitations make it significantly hard to run other OSes on these devices through their stock firmware, stifling this potential.

Anchorboot is a new platform firmware distribution for ARM-based ChromeOS devices using coreboot and U-Boot, with the aim to make it easy to install and use conventional Linux distributions on them through UEFI support. As part of this effort, we will first improve and extend integration between both projects to the ARM architectures, then work on a selection of Chromebooks to fix any issues and to port device drivers to either project where necessary. As each board's work is complete, we will prepare and distribute pre-built, tested firmware images ready to be flashed on these boards along with sources, instructions on how to use the images, and other documentation relevant to the devices.