I’m still using my chromebook with coreboot as a portable thinclient. Due to small built-in storage (only 16GB), i’m also using microSD card as a secondary storage for larger files and project. However i was strugeling with microSD card not being mounted at boot (waiting for device), my solution was to just physically eject and insert the card at boot, but it is pretty inconvient and is probably destroying the card pins.

Recently, I was trying to upgrade my toy K3s cluster using System Upgrade Plans operator. Applied example manifest, control-plane upgraded without issues, but pod for upgrading worker node was constantly restarting with error in logs exec /bin/upgrade.sh: exec format error. I would kinda expect that issue on ARM system (although we come a long way in the last couple of years!), but my nodes are running on x86 CPU, so what is happening?

At the beginning of this article, i would like to mention that i’m a noob when it comes to android custom kernel or ROM development, so some of these information may be obvious to some of you, but it was relatively hard to find one place with up-to-date information on this topic.

Backstory - why i want to compile the kernel for my phone?

My current phone is the Xiaomi Mi 9 - i’m very happy with this phone, it is more than fast enough for my everyday needs, and the photo quality (especially on gcam) is also pretty good. My main issue with this phone was under MIUI 12 - it had a couple of annoying bugs that will probably never get fixed:

In this post i will focus on replacing the ChromeOS with Linux. Before i was running Eupnea on my chromebook, it was working alright, but the boot splashscreen was quite annoying (and recently i encourage a ‘softbrick’ after kernel update).

If you want to dualboot linux+chromeos i would sugest to stick with Eupnea on external storage, like fast SD card or USB stick.

What do i need?

• Some patience
• Two USB drives - one with UEFI compatible linux of your choice - I will install EndeavourOS via Ventoy because i’m too lazy to configure a decent looking arch desktop on my own, and a second one to backup stock firmware. Technically you can do that on the same drive, but just to be safe, I recommend two separate ones.
• Enabled Developer mode, and disabled WP

Step zero - validate coreboot support for your device

Visit https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices website and check if your device have support for ‘UEFI Firmware’. You probably can also do the same thing using WP_LEGACY, but i decided to just replace firmware in my chromebook.

UPDATE 2023-08-07: Eupnea Project has been discontinued, new install of Depthboot are not recommended, if you can, just use UEFI + audio fixes. Also their Discord and Github was compromised. If you are currenty using Depthboot it is recommended to remove their repository from package manager list.

Let me start with that - second-hand chromebooks are awesome value for cheap, long-lasting battery, portable Netflix and SSH machine.

I’ve got my Chromebook about a year ago for 55 USD, it is a HP Chromebook 11a G6. I love how lightweight it is and that i can charge it from literally everything using USB-C ports (for real - it can even take charge from normal 5V USB charger). And the battery is awesome, it lasts a whole working day of moderate use. I bought a chromebook mostly as an experiment, on how the ChromeOS works for “poweruser” - and to be honest, it isn’t that bad, mostly because of the Linux Debian container, but it is still very limiting.