Getting Started

Welcome to ChromiumOS development! This guide will help you bootstrap your workflow by making sure you have the right hardware, development environment, and source checkout. The guide will also step you through building, testing, uploading and committing code.

If you are familiar with ChromiumOS development and have a workstation, jump ahead to TODO(Checking out the source code). Otherwise continue reading to understand the high level overview of the Chromium projects and repositories.

The Chromium projects

The Chromium projects include Chromium and ChromiumOS, the open-source projects behind the Google Chrome browser and Google ChromeOS. Read more about the Chromium projects at the chromium.org home page. Chromium (the browser) and Chromium OS (the platform) share code due to historical development decisions.

ChromeOS and ChromiumOS are two separate products which share the same code base yet the available features and look-and-feel of each product vary. Chromium OS is supported by the open source community and ChromeOS is supported by Google and its partners. Read more about the differences between ChromiumOS and ChromeOS at the ChromiumOS FAQ.

Repositories

ChromiumOS is developed across several repositories, the most prominent being chromium and chromiumos. The chromium repository contains implementations of the user-facing surfaces of ChromiumOS, the Chromium browser, and a communication interface with lower layers of the OS. These lower layers in the chromiumos repository include components such as the kernel, system daemons, firmware, and implementations of low-level technologies such as Bluetooth and WiFi.

Links to Code Search for these repositories:

• chromium: https://source.chromium.org/chromium
• chromiumos: https://source.chromium.org/chromiumos

Hardware requirements

Developing an operating system requires significant resources such as a powerful workstation to build and debug the system and a ChromiumOS device to flash and test changes.

Head over to the hardware requirements page to understand what hardware you need in order to develop ChromiumOS.