ChromeOS 76.0.3789.0 Rolling out to the Dev Channel – Adds Crostini GPU Flag

The Chrome team has just released the first Developer Build of ChomeOS 76 and it brings at least one welcomed change that eliminates the need to manually enable GPU support on Crostini. I am currently doing a teardown of the build to try to spot other changes and will update this post accordingly.

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Crostini GPU Flag Exposed

Google has exposed a flag in chrome://flags to automatically enable GPU support on supported machines. With this said, I would not advise users replace their gaming rigs with a Chromebook although this should be able to play some lightweight games.

If you wish to enable this flag, enter chrome://flags/#crostini-gpu-support in the URL of your browser and change the flag to enable.

You will then be prompted to restart your Chromebook for this change to take effect. You will then need to update your Debian install by running “sudo apt-get update” followed by “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” and restart your container.

You can now run the command “glxinfo -B” to see your video card information. If your output contains “Device: virgl ” then you have GPU support.

As a reminder, only a small number of Chromebooks support GPU acceleration

Crostini Backup Flag Enabled By Default

There are no longer any excuses for not baking up your Crostini container, Google has officially enabled the backup flag by default. You can backup your container by going to Settings > Linux (Beta) > Linux > Backup and Restore. You can also restore backups from the same menu.

Linux Applications Can Now Be Uninstalled From The Launcher

You can now uninstall un-needed applications from the ChromeOS launcher with a simple right click. It is important to note that in order for this to work, the application would need to have either been installed via a .deb package or apt. It does not seem to uninstall Flatpack based installs, manual build from source installs or things installed via a script.

Lots of references to “PluginVM”

Google has made quite a few changes to “PluginVM” which may soon allow users to install custom virtual machines. This seems to currently be targeted towards enterprise users from what I can tell. What is interesting is

 "PluginVmAllowed": {
   "os": ["chromeos"],
    "test_policy": { "PluginVmAllowed": true },
    "pref_mappings": [
{ "pref": "cros.device.plugin_vm_allowed" }
 ]
 },
 "PluginVmLicenseKey": {
   "os": ["chromeos"],
   "test_policy": {
     "PluginVmLicenseKey": "LICENSE_KEY"
    },
   "pref\_mappings": [
     { "pref": "cros.device.plugin_vm_license_key" }
    ]
 },

According to the documentation of the GSuite Policy, it is possible to specify Windows as a potential operating system an automatically pass in a license key. This will also automount a folder called MyFiles/PluginVM to the ChromeOS files app to allow for sharing of content. This may be the reason why Campfire was deprecated.

You can read the full changelog at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+log/75.0.3770.10..76.0.3789.0?pretty=fuller&n=10000