The reports have revealed that Google might start playing nice with Microsoft’s OS sometime in the future by allowing its Pixelbook to boot Windows 10. Google is working on a rumoured “Campfire” which is an alt-OS mode and it could allow users to dual boot Windows 10 on Chromebooks.
The mentions of WHCK (Windows Hardware Certification Kit) and HLK (Windows Hardware Lab Kit) in Chromium commits had confirmed that the AltOS mode is indeed about the Windows operating system.
The latest comments made to the same commit in Chromium Gerrit now suggests the Pixelbook may be the only Chromebook on the market today that would support new Campfire, or Windows 10. There’s still a chance that the future Chromebook from other manufacturers may support Windows 10 dual booting, but for now, the current generation Pixelbook will only get Windows 10.
“Considering that this is and should forever remain an Eve-specific thing, I think it would be better to attach the custom updater higher (e.g. other boards should never even have a reason to “preserve” anything here so this call is useless). We will still need to change more about the Eve legacy update flow anyway to deal with the fact that it was shipped before we started putting cros_allow_auto_update files into CBFS, so I think we’ll end up needing to overwrite all of check_and_update_legacy() anyway. Why not do that right now? I think keeping stuff cleaner for all future boards weighs higher than the little bit of code duplication this would net us for this one board,” a commit on Chromium Gerrit reads. It’s worth noting that “Eve” is the codename of Google Pixelbook.
At this point, this is not much more than a rumour and speculation. Although the search engine giant has a hardware event in a few weeks and there’s a chance that more details could be announced soon.
Chromebook is an Internet-based device, similar to Microsoft’s Always Connected PCs initiation. While it doesn’t make sense to run Windows 10 on a Chromebook, the power user could take a Chromebook to a new level with Windows onboard. By the looks of thing, the Pixelbook or eventually the Chromebook users will be able to boot Windows 10 and Chrome OS at the same time.
The Alt OS / Campfire would require a minimum 40GB data storage to run, that means around 30GB of storage will be allocated to Windows installation and 10GB for Chrome OS. It’s not a bad idea to allow dual-booting of Windows 10 as it would expand the usability of Chromebooks for all users.
Thanks, Divi for the tip!