14 DAY TRIAL // Softpedia has been informed today, April 21, 2016, by Dylan Callahan from the Chromium OS for SBC project about the general availability of the fifth stable release of the Chromium OS port for Raspberry Pi 2.
Dubbed Sam Kinison, Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.5 comes approximately two months from the debut of the previous version, 0.4 "Lenny Bruce," which introduced a redesigned kernel, LZ4 compression, a custom BFS scheduler optimized for desktop systems, and numerous latency improvements.
The development of the Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computer continues at a fast pace thanks to the dedicated team of developers behind this unique and very promising project, which now has an official homepage and aims to come to all SBCs (single-board computers).
What's new in Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.5
Release highlights of Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.5 include multiple improvements to the kernel, which has been rebased on the 4.2.8-ckt8 upstream release announced earlier this week, such as removal of some extra debugging code and nonessential features, thus making it smaller and faster to load.
The audio stack has also received some much-needed improvements, and it now integrates the latest sound drivers, the storage has been optimized to be much faster, especially thanks to the addition of the BFQ hierarchical scheduling algorithm, and it looks like the on-demand scheduler has received tweaks to its "io_is_busy" function.
"We've released version 0.5 of the Chromium Operating System today for Raspberry Pi 2 computers, providing rock-solid stability, fixing various issues found in the last couple of releases and greatly improved overall performance and experience," said Dylan Callahan for Softpedia.
The user experience is also one of the strongest points today's Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.5 release, thanks to the implementation of the BFS scheduler, which it appears to be SMP aware now. What this means exactly is that the Chromium OS port for Raspberry Pi 2 will take advantage of the multi core CPU of the SBC.
Lastly, the video playback performance has been optimized, and it's more stable thanks to the latest VC4 GPU driver, which should also fix common display issues reported by users with non-1080p resolutions. Also, WiFi has been enabled by default for various firmware pieces. Download Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.5 right now.
