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.
It should be noted that regular ChromeOS (what ships in Chromebooks) already supports fwupd, so this is only for the “Flex” version that you can install on a non-Chromebook computer. Right now, if you need to update your firmware, you had to boot into a different operating system, either Windows or a desktop Linux distro with fwupd. That will come in handy when people need to update their motherboard, connected accessories, or other hardware. The fwupd utility has been a big help on desktop Linux, and it’s great to see Google bringing it to ChromeOS Flex.
There’s no timeline for when this feature might show up in a stable version of ChromeOS Flex, but chances are that following Chrome’s regular release schedule, it could take a few months.
Source: Chromium Project
