Finally, the much-awaited update for the Chromium OS, dubbed 0.4, has been released for Raspberry Pi 2. The 0.4 update has been mentioned as a major update when comparing to the previous version and includes some groundbreaking changes. A lot of tweaking has been done on the kernel which has brought about huge performance improvements. There are also cool features like OnDemand governor, LZ4 compression, BFS scheduler optimized for desktop systems and lots of latency modifications.
Some of the noteworthy changes are detailed here. There is trim support in version 0.4. The free space on the stateful partition has been increased drastically from 200MB to 2 GB. With the BFQ scheduler read/write access latency has improved a lot. A very useful feature for improving the storage is the introduction of mount support without atime for microSD cards that are slower.
For enhancing the user experience Chromium OS 0.4 has some tricks up its sleeve. Features like the simplified Google account login, default activation of zRAM and automatic time synchronization during boot are new and feels very refreshing. The default activation of the zRAM allows users to open up three times the number of tabs that they could open before. Apart from this, the OS has been based on the stable R49 branch of the upstream ChromeOS which promises a lot of performance improvements and stability.
There are some known issues as well with the Chromium OS 0.4 update. Netflix, Wi-Fi, YouTube 4K are some of the things that don’t work as of now. But don’t worry, as they will be fixed soon in the coming releases.