[yjftsjthsd-h]

> one of the dirty secrets about how Chromebooks manage to get so cheap is they use the cheapest ARM processors with ridiculous amounts of binary blobs patched in that will never go upstream, so kernel updates are almost nonexistent

I don't think that's actually true? For starters, the majority of Chromebooks are x86 machines, even most of the cheap ones. But more to the point, AFAIK Chromebooks, even ARM Chromebooks, are maintained mainline/upstream in linux. This is surprisingly hard to get a good citation for, but see ex. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/arm64/boo... which is device tree stuff for... honestly the code names confuse me, but I think kukui, jacuzzi, and fennel are all names for Chromebooks (or boards in Chromebooks, I think).

[pjmlp]

Just like on Android, there is Linux kernel, and then there are the stable ABI Google specific driver frameworks with OS IPC that will never be part of upstream.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Okay? My point was that

> one of the dirty secrets about how Chromebooks manage to get so cheap is they use the cheapest ARM processors with ridiculous amounts of binary blobs patched in that will never go upstream, so kernel updates are almost nonexistent

doesn't seem to be true. Google doing its own thing in userspace is separately annoying to me but actually an advantage in terms of keeping the machine's kernel up to date.

[pjmlp]

Except it hardly matters when most stuff are actually drivers running in userspace, aka binary blobs.