A Great Linux Feature Is Coming to ChromeOS Flex
CSO Online, Thursday, August 22nd, 2024
ChromeOS Flex is the version of ChromeOS that you can run on any PC, designed primarily for schools and organizations that don't want to fully switch to new hardware. Now, Google is working on a much-needed feature that might be familiar to desktop Linux fans.
A change was recently pushed to the Chromium open-source project, which will add a feature flag for "firmware updates" for ChromeOS Flex users. The commit's description reads the following:
"Add feature flag for ChromeOS Flex firmware updates. This will be used to experimentally enable firmware updates for internal devices via fwupd on ChromeOS Flex."
That sounds like Google is working on adopting fwupd, the tool that most of the Linux ecosystem uses for handling firmware updates, to ChromeOS Flex. UEFI firmware updates from an operating system could, before, only be performed from Windows or a DOS-based system, so fwupd arrived in 2015 to give users a way to service their firmware from Linux. It's open-source, and now, it appears that ChromeOS Flex will be implementing this as well.