Sure, and when I worked at Google on Chromecast there was also that build of Chromium.

All of that is very different from The G actually providing a packaged official Chrome build, though. Which for some reason they couldn't be bothered to do before (Firefox exists though)

Brave exists on arm64, too!

Yeah, strange, there has been a build of CEF for Linux ARM64 since forever.

Much like Android, Chromebooks are considered a different target even though they use the Linux kernel. This release will be for a generic Linux desktop binary rather than specific 1st party systems.

Me too. Trying to get Chrome to run in Docker on an ARM Mac was a battle that I didn't win (I didn't want to fight the battle to start with but I had to use a Mac rather than Linux).

There's always Firefox.

Couldn’t be bothered - the Google way. Nobody ever got promoted for doing something easy and useful.

I would have more faith in Raspberry Pi's own patched build of Chromium to do hardware acceleration properly on the Pi than I would have in Google's generic Chrome build.

It's just about their branded closed build, not even about V8 JIT which was there already.

Idk about "officially", but it works just fine on arm64 here: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/widevine-installer

This is "just" about providing the official Chrome binary to ARM64 "desktop" Linux.

You've been able to build and run Chromium on ARM Linux for a long time (I'm running it right now), it's just that they haven't provided an officially branded Chrome.

This is a good thing. While Chromium works well, there are a few things (like syncing) that is a bit of a pain to set up.

The reason they didn't release Chrome for arm64 Linux almost certainly wasn't about technical feasibility, but rather about it being worth the support costs.

The Android arm64 Chrome build is clearly worth it to them, as is the Chrome build for ARM Chromebooks.

Before this point they probably didn't think that arm64 Linux was a worthwhile target to support (especially since Chromium was available on arm64 Linux anyways).

I'm not sure what has changed in the desktop/laptop ARM Linux market that changed their minds - or maybe they want to put their shoulder behind that market.

The Chromium project builds many things. The Android version is just one of those things.

It required custom glibc patches, and getting videoes to work required some kernel stuff as well.

This is a combination of getting stuff merged upstream, and removing the need for some more specialist features.

they probably meant desktop. i do browser test automation (selenium, vibium), and the lack of google chrome on arm64 trips up new users frequently. the workaround is to just use chromium, but that's a confusing extra step for some if it's not automated and hidden for you.

on that note, it would have been nice if they also clarified if this means they'll be shipping an official "chrome for testing" for arm64 linux, too.

What is necessary to run Linux ARM64 binaries on Android ARM64?

To run conda-forge arm64 Linux binaries on Android in termux requires proot-distro because the ABIs are slightly different FWIU.

What is necessary to run Android ARM64 binaries on Linux ARM64?

Android Studio, LineageOS or BlissOS's outdated Android containers, a runtime like vinegarhq/sober that emulates just enough of Android.

An Android binary that makes Linux compatible syscalls only (that doesn't require Android libraries that aren't compiled for Linux) won't work will it?

Maybe Android has its own libc? So they compile it for Android, but not for general Linux.

Also curious about this.

No, it will not. At least for now.

that's not really "running chrome" but "running that specific DRM part browsers use to play content from companies you shouldn't give your money to"

sudo apt install chromium (or chromium-browser in the past)

Chrome had no official arm64 build. There are distro specific builds from debian, fedora etc for arm64 chromium, but google had no official arm64 build.

There were actually some paid services that provided a distro-agnostic chromium arm64 builds mostly targeting people running puppeteer on AWS ARM lambda. You can see some discussion here https://github.com/alixaxel/chrome-aws-lambda/issues/241

edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment.

They already exist and work just fine: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/widevine-installer

I thought the same though this comment clarifies it -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357608

Since the inception of Raspberry Pi at least?

What is it like using a Spark as a workstation?

Wait what, how is glibc patching related to YouTube and Spotify? Could you not watch YouTube using an arm64 build of Chromium or Firefox?

This one is so frustrating because aarch64 android would work great under kvm, but it's a pain to set up without the NDK cooperating.

But as far as i know, there has never been working HW accelerated video in their build of Chromium. But yeah, I guess you have point.

Android's libc is called Bionic.

Bionic (software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)

Support? This is Google!

Don't most people use chromium instead of chrome anyways on Linux?

A fully statically compiled Linux ARM64 binary which only interacts with the kernel through syscalls should run no problem on ARM64 Android. From the kernel's perspective, there is no difference between a "Linux binary" and an "Android binary" because the kernel in Android is Linux.

Most programs want to interact with various system libraries and system services though. Android and your typical desktop Linux system share pretty much nothing aside from the kernel.

I use a DGX spark, with Cosmic as my DE, and it's super awesome.

This is a bit of a franekin-distro, as it's ubuntu + nvdia packgages + system 76 packages, but it works pretty well.

I've been using Flatpack chromium, which is ok for most things. It performs a bit better than Firefox does. Having access to official Chrome will be nice though, as it should come with Widevine support. Chromium doesn't support DRM, so some things like Netflix don't work.

Longer than that. Raspberry Pi isn't that old, it only launched in 2012.

Just like any other Ubuntu machine, really. Just lots (128GB) of RAM and relatively lots of cores (10 efficiency, 10 performance). It's not screaming fast, but it's absolutely fast enough for anything I need to do and it's got insanely fast networking options if I need them.

I like it, and the local AI options make it fun enough, too.

Apart from a few hassles. No pre-packaged Discord or Slack or Chromium or Spotify are the only things I've run into really.

If enough people ask Broadcom to do VA-API on their platforms getting that enabled on Chromium shouldn't be too hard. The caveat is that codec support is limited (no VP8/VP9/AV1).

Spotify requires Widevine CDM to run, and Firefox doesn't come with Widevine on Debian-based distros. The .so hasn't been available on arm64 except for ChromeOS. You can rip the .so out of ChromeOS (that's what RaspberryPi OS did). But ChromeOS uses its own flavor of libc so a couple of patches to glibc are required.

Same thing with YouTube. A few months ago, YouTube started to require Widevine CDM if one uses the m.youtube.com site. I can't use the non-mobile site on my phone for performance issues, so I'm essentially locked into Widevine for watching YouTube, too.

What specifically doesn't work?

Support in this context means bugfixing, performance/crash testing across devices and chipsets, security updates, etc, not "phone/email support".

Yes, and the last thing we need is Google's cancer spreading to Linux.

Only if they restrict themselves to the officially supported syscalls, otherwise Android will kill the application.

Why is it easier to run a Linux ARM64 binary on Android than to run an Android ARM64 binary on Linux?

My guess is that the reason is the same reason that there aren't official updated Android containers

most people just click the "internet" button and use whatever was already pre-installed.

And first arm64 device was released in 2013

Chromium has been pre-packaged for ARM in Ubuntu for more than a decade now. Did they throw it away with Snaps?

I'm not aware of anything specific other than the fact that it's not officially supported as a build target so you have to hack up the build system to make it work. Example: https://github.com/SnowNF/ndk-aarch64-linux

Firefox pre-packaged for Ubuntu on my NVIDIA Spark has no problems with YouTube?

I guess it must be a snap, not a deb package, but... wouldn't that work?

I don't know what you mean by an "Android ARM64 binary". If you make an ELF file containing ARM64 machine code, it doesn't matter to Linux whether you meant for it to run on Linux in an Android system, on Linux in a desktop GNU system, or on Linux in some environment with without much of a userspace at all (such as a stripped down initramfs environment).

If you mean something like an Android app, the answer is that there's a ton of system stuff that the app depends on, it interacts with more than just the kernel.

I meant Linux users and chromium is the one that's already in the repos and doesn't need extra work. The default browser in most distros is Firefox

Ha, touche! But it worked on ARM long before that :)

I’m developing on an Nvidia Orin which requires Ubuntu 22.04. Snaps are broken on this platform. I used an alternative ppa that provided a chromium.deb.

Regular YouTube works as is (but has performance issues on my weak phone.)

It's m.youtube.com that seems to require the DRM thing, at least for me. Have you tried that?

.

  CC= clang
  CXX=clang++
  $CC hello.c -o hello_android_c
  $CXX hello.cpp -o hello_android_cpp -static-libstdc++
  $CXX hello_asm.cpp -o hello_android_cpp_asm_syscalls_only -ffreestanding -nostdlib -fuse-ld=lld
  find -name hello_android -exec readelf -l {} \;

But go binaries don't require (bionic) libc unless you compile with CGO_ENABLED=1

m.youtube.com works fine in both Epiphany and Firefox on my Librem 5 with PureOS.

Turns out you’re right. I just uninstalled the CDM and YouTube indeed works! I’m still absolutely, positively sure that m.youtube.com started gating it for me last August without a doubt. [0]

Maybe they pulled some temporary A/B experiment on me? I’ll probably never know. Thanks for the correction.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45193597