3D Hardware acceleration

All Chromebooks provide some 3D hardware acceleration in Chrome OS. However, experience with crouton chroot varies depending on the release chosen and the type of hardware.

Haswell/Bay Trail-based Chromebooks

(e.g. Acer C720 peppy, ASUS Chromebook C200 squawks)

Haswell/Bay Trail-based Chromebook require updated drivers to support 3D acceleration.

Working releases:

• Ubuntu 12.04 (precise): crouton automatically install backported drivers
• Ubuntu >=13.10 onwards (saucy/trusty).
• Debian jessie/sid

Releases that do not work:

• kali: Based on Ubuntu 12.04. No fix yet. It might be doable to backport drivers though.
• Debian wheezy: There is no backported drivers provided by Debian, so this will probably never be supported.

Intel-based Chromebooks on kernel 3.4

(e.g. Acer C710 parrot; Cr-48 x86-mario is an exception, it works accross the board, as it uses a much older chip: i915 driver)

OpenGL mesa libraries version >=9 require kernel >=3.6 to work on i965-based hardware (e.g. Sandy/Ivy Bridge). crouton includes a fix to use old mesa libraries on recent Ubuntu releases.

Working releases:

• Ubuntu 12.04 (precise), and kali
• Ubuntu >=13.10 onwards (saucy/trusty): crouton automatically downgrades mesa libraries.
• Debian wheezy

Releases that do not work:

• Debian jessie/sid. See this comment in issue 704 for a workaround.

Chromebook Pixel

Should work fine on all releases (it does not use kernel 3.4, nor is Haswell-based).

ARM-based Chromebooks

No support at all. Also, the hardware only supports OpenGL ES.

Tools to check

Figure out the PCI id of the video device (see PCI id database):

cat /sys/class/graphics/fb0/device/vendor
cat /sys/class/graphics/fb0/device/device

Check if hardware acceleration works:

• glxinfo: OpenGL vendor string should be Intel on Intel hawdware (not VMWare/llvmpipe)
• xdriinfo: No error
• glxgears -info: Gears are displayed and running