The Maru Experimental Board

Maru is a experimental board I created to better understand Chromium OS. Right now its primary aim is to be built and ultimately, support a wide range of hardware, ala-CloudReady.

Roadmap

👏 MAKE 👏 IT 👏 BUILD 👏
work on driver support.
- include Libinput support and add additional drivers.
Omaha Update server
- This is intended for OTA updates. We want people to use Maru as a simple update.
Other architecture support
- i386 won't be supported, unfortunately.

Building Maru

You'll need to grab the entire Chromium OS Source code to build this.

Fetching `depot_tools`

To be able to pull the entire Chromium OS tree, we'll need to use Google's in-house tools for pulling the entire source.

$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/repo
$ sudo chmod 777 /usr/local/repo
$ cd /usr/local/repo
$ git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
$ export PATH=/usr/local/repo/depot_tools:$PATH
$ umask 022

Prepare environment

let's go ahead and make a project folder, it should look like this.

$ mkdir -p $HOME/project/chromiumos-R74      # This is the directory to hold Chromium OS source code, name it according to the release you are going to build.
$ mkdir -p $HOME/project/overlays            # This is the directory to hold this repository.

Now, we're ready to pull the Chromium OS source code.

But first we need to know which release you'd like to build via using git ls-remote

$ git ls-remote https://chromium.googlesource.com/a/chromiumos/manifest.git | grep release

Keep in mind you should be looking for release-Rxx-XXXXX.B, since these are the "stable" versions.

When you're done selecting what repo you need to use, go ahead and run the following commands

$ cd $HOME/project/chromiumos-R74
$ repo init -u https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/manifest.git --repo-url https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/repo.git -b stabilize-10718.88.B  # The last R70 stable release
$ repo sync -j8         # Raise this number if you have a fast Internet connection

Note: This Repository is only built for R74, if you need to build this to R76, then you might need to do some modificiations. We follow ArnoldTheBat upstream.

Enabling Google Login

If you want to enable Google login in your build, make sure you have .googleapikeys in your $HOME. repo will know what to do with it.

.googleapikeys should look like the following:

'google_api_key': 'your api key',
'google_default_client_id': 'your client id',
'google_default_client_secret': 'your client secret',

Finally, head to this documentation to get an API key.

Prepare the Overlay

Finally, you need to symbolic link this repo after cloning inside project/overlays.

$ cd /project/overlays
$ git clone https://github.com/sr229/maru.git

$ cd /project/chromiumos-R74/src/overlays
$ ln -s /project/overlays/maru/* .

Build the image

Once that's all done, all that its left to do is run a this and wait.

$ export BOARD=maru-amd64
$ cros_sdk -- ./setup_board --board=${BOARD}
$ cros_sdk -- ./build_packages --board=${BOARD}
$ cros_sdk -- ./build_image --board=${BOARD}

The build system will make a chroot and build Chromium OS according to the Maru configuration. It should take less than 5 hours to build on a i7 with 8GB RAM, but it could be slower.

Once the build finishes, you can find your images at /project/chromiumos-R74/src/build/images/maru-amd64.

Installing the image

You can use dd in Linux or use Rufus in DD mode in Linux to your USB.

Once the image finishes writing to a USB, boot it to your PC, and cross your fingers.

Contributing

Please read the Chromium OS Developer Guide to get yourself familiarized with how everything works.

zvyn/maru