Running Custom Containers Under Chrome OS

Welcome to the containers project where we support running arbitrary code inside of VMs in Chrome OS. This is a heavily-technical document; for user-friendly information, see The Keyword & Set up Linux (Beta) on your Chromebook documentation.

If you're interested in hacking on Crostini itself, take a look at the Crostini developer guide

We won't get into technical details for specific projects as each one already has relevant documentation. We instead will link to them for further reading.

Overview

There are many codenames and technologies involved in this project, so hopefully we can demystify things here.

Crostini is the umbrella term for making Linux application support easy to use and integrating well with Chrome OS. It largely focuses on getting you a Terminal with a container with easy access to install whatever developer-focused tools you might want. It's the default first-party experience.

The Terminal app is the first entry point to that environment. It‘s basically just crosh. It takes care of kicking off everything else in the system that you’ll interact with.

crosvm is a custom virtual machine monitor that takes care of managing KVM, the guest VM, and facilitating the low-level (virtio-based) communication.

Termina is a VM image with a stripped-down Chrome OS linux kernel and userland tools. Its only goal is to boot up as quickly as possible and start running containers. Many of the programs/tools are custom here. In hindsight, we might not have named it one letter off from “Terminal”, but so it goes.

Concierge is a daemon that runs in Chrome OS which handles lifecycle management of VMs and containers and uses gRPC over vsock to communicate with Maitred.

Maitred is our init and service/container manager inside of the VM, and is responsible for communicating with Concierge (which runs outside of the VM). Concierge sends it requests and Maitred is responsible for carrying those out.

Tremplin is a daemon that runs in the VM to provide a gRPC wrapper for LXD. This includes basic functionality such as creating and starting containers, but also provides other Crostini-specific integration such as setting up a container's primary user, and setting up apt repositories in the guest to match the Chrome OS milestone.

Cicerone is a daemon that runs in Chrome OS which handles all communication directly with the VM and container once the container starts running. Specifically, it communicates with Tremplin (which runs inside of the VM), and Garcon (which runs in a container inside the VM).

Garcon runs inside the container and provides integration with Cicerone/Chrome for more convenient/natural behavior. For example, if the container wants to open a URL, Garcon takes care of plumbing that request back out.

Seneschal is a daemon that runs in Chrome OS that handles lifecycle management of 9P servers. When Concierge starts a VM, it sends a message to Seneschal to also start a 9s instance for that VM. Then, while configuring the VM, Concierge sends a message to Maitred instructing it to connect to the 9s instance and mount it inside the VM.

9s is a server for the 9P file system protocol. There is one instance of 9s for each VM and it provides that VM with access to the user's data stored outside the VM. This includes things like the Downloads folder, Google Drive, and removable media. The lifecycle of each 9s instance is managed by Seneschal. Each 9s instance starts with no access to any files. Access to specific paths is granted by sending a message to Seneschal, which makes the requested path available to the specified 9s instance. Requests to share paths can only be triggered by some user action.

Sommelier is a Wayland proxy compositor that runs inside the container. Sommelier provides seamless forwarding of contents, input events, clipboard data, etc... between Wayland applications inside the container and Chrome.

Chrome does not run an X server or otherwise support the X protocol; thus Sommelier is also responsible for starting up XWayland (in rootless mode), acting as the X window manager to the clients, and translating the X protocol inside the container into the Wayland protocol for Chrome.

You can launch crosh and use the vmc command to create new VMs manually. It will only run Termina at this point in time. You can then use vsh to connect to a VM instance and use LXC to run arbitrary containers.

The default container launched via Terminal is Debian with custom packages. See cros-container-guest-tools for more details.

In this flow, the VM is named termina and the container is penguin .

Quickstart

Here's a quick run down of how to get started.

Buy a Google Pixelbook. It is our objectively biased opinion that it's a nice piece of hardware. Or see the Supported Now section below.

Make sure you're running at least R72 (released Feb 2019). Start a system update if need be and reboot. This should work in the stable channel. You do not need to put it into developer mode.

Enable support. Go to Chrome OS settings (chrome://settings). Scroll down to “Linux (Beta)”. Turn it on!

Open the app switcher (press the Search/Launcher key) and type “Terminal”.

Launch the Terminal app.

Profit!

If you're interested in Android Studio, check out their documentation.

Runtime Features

OK, so you've got your container going, but what exactly can you expect to work?

Outbound network connections (IPv4).

Unaccelerated Graphics.

Wayland programs (preferred; via Sommelier).

X programs (compatibility via Sommelier and XWayland).

Audio output in R74+ and experimental capture/microphone in R79+ images.

Missing Features

There‘s a lot of low-hanging fruit we’re working on fleshing out.

Peripheral access (USB/Bluetooth/etc...).

Accelerated graphics.

Video hardware decoding.

IMEs.

There are more things we‘re thinking about, but we’re being very careful/cautious in rolling out features as we want to make sure we aren't compromising overall system security in the process. The (large) FAQ below should hopefully hit a lot of those topics.

Security

While running arbitrary code is normally a security risk, we believe we've come up with a runtime model that sufficiently mitigates & contains the code. The VM is our security boundary, so everything inside of the VM is considered untrusted. Our current VM guest image is also running our hardened kernel to further improve the security of the containers, but we consider this a nice feature rather than relying on it for overall system security.

In this model, the rest of the Chrome OS system should remain protected from arbitrary code (malicious or accidental) that runs inside of the containers inside of the VM.

The only contact with the outside world is via crosvm, and each channel talks to individual processes (each of which are heavily sandboxed).

User Data In The Container

With the shift to cloud services, current security thinking highlights the fact that getting account credentials (e.g. your Google/Facebook passwords) is way more interesting than attacking your desktop/laptop. They are not wrong. The current VM/container Chrome OS solution does not currently improve on this. Put plainly, anything entered into the container is the responsibility of the user currently. So if you run an insecure/compromised container, and then type your passwords into the container, they can be stolen even while the rest of the Chrome OS system remains secure.

Extracting Disk Images

Sometimes it‘s useful to be able to extract the disk image from a VM and move it to another machine, either to recover the data if the VM won’t start the normal way, or to track down the source of a bug. This can be done from crosh, even on non-dev mode devices, using the following command:

crosh > vmc export < vm name > < file name > [ removable storage name ]

Where <vm name> is e.g. termina , <file name> can be any file name, and [removable storage name] is the drive label. Remember to quote this if the name contains spaces e.g. "My USB Drive" . The backup will be stored either on the removable storage specified, or in your Downloads folder if you didn't specify one. The file is a gzipped tar archive of the raw VM disk image and can be extracted and mounted on another system as follows:

tar - xzf < file name > sudo mount < img file > / path / to / mount

The container data is then available at /path/to/mount/lxd/storage-pools/default/containers/penguin/rootfs .

Persistence

Processes in VMs and containers do not survive logout (since they live in the user‘s encrypted storage) and are killed automatically. They also do not automatically start at login (to avoid persistent attacks), nor can they automatically run at boot (without a login session) since they wouldn’t be accessible (as they‘re in the user’s encrypted storage).

Executable & Writable Code

The Termina VM disk image is downloaded to the writable stateful partition like other Chrome components. In order to make sure the contents aren't modified, we use dm-verity. This also means only images signed by Google may be loaded, and the image is always read-only.

Hardware Attacks

The Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities have implications for safely using VMs. We‘ve applied fixes/mitigations to make sure VMs can’t attack the host system or other VMs. See the Chromium OS wiki page for more details.

Lifecycles

Once you've got the Terminal installed (which takes care of installing all the other necessary components like Termina), the system is ready to use.

By virtue of having things installed, nothing starts running right away. In that regard, when you log out, everything is shut down and killed, and when you log in, nothing is automatically restarted.

When you run the Terminal, the Termina VM will be started automatically, and the default Crostini container will be started in that. You can now connect to the container via SSH or SFTP (via the Files app).

Similarly, if you run a Linux application directly (e.g. pinned to your shelf or via the launcher), the Termina VM will be started automatically, and the container that application belongs to will be launched. There's no need to run Terminal manually in these situations.

When you close all visible applications, the VM/containers are not shut down. If you want to manually stop them, you can do so via crosh and the vmc command.

Similarly, if you want to spawn independent VMs, or more containers, you can do so via crosh and the vmc and vsh commands.

Persistence

All the VMs and containers created, and the data within those containers, will persist across user sessions (logout/login). They are kept in the same per-user encrypted storage as the rest of the browser's data.

If a VM or container are stopped or killed ungracefully (e.g. powerloss), then data might be lost and need recovery like anything else in the system.

Device Support

While we would like to be able to bring this work to all Chromebooks, the required kernel and hardware features limit where we can deploy this. A lot of features we use had to be backported, and the further back we go, the more difficult & risky it is to do so. We don't want to compromise system stability and security here.

Supported Now

These are the initial set of boards that we‘re supporting. They’re a mix of x86_64 and aarch64 kernels. Make sure you're running at least R72 as we no longer document older releases.

You can look up the board name in our public device list.

atlas

banon

bob

buddy (R83)

celes

coral

cyan

edgar

elm

eve

fizz

gandof (R83)

grunt

guado (R83)

hana

hatch

kalista

kefka

kevin

lulu (R83)

nami

nautilus

nocturne

oak

octopus

paine (R83)

pyro

rammus

reef

reks

relm

rikku (R83)

samus (R80)

sand

sarien

scarlet

setzer

snappy

soraka

terra

tidus (R83)

ultima

wizpig

yuna (R83)

Experimental Flags

We roll out initial support for some devices behind a flag ( chrome://flags ). If your device is in such a state, you won't see the “Linux (Beta)” settings option until you turn on this flag.

Warning: This is behind a flag because we‘re still testing the feature to make sure it’s stable & ready for wider release, so turning this on yourself might lead to system instability. YMMV.

To turn it on:

Go to chrome://flags in your browser.

in your browser. Search for enable-experimental-kernel-vm-support .

. Enable the flag.

Reboot.

Follow the Quickstart guide.

If you wish to turn it off:

Go to chrome://flags in your browser.

in your browser. Click the “Reset all” button to reset all flags back to the default.

Reboot.

Hardware Requirements

We are not planning on requiring a minimum amount of RAM, storage, or CPU speed, but certainly the more you have of each, the better the system will perform.

You will need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization.

On x86 platforms, this has many names. Intel refers to it as VT-x & VMX. AMD refers to it AMD-V & SVM.

BayTrail Systems

Chromebooks using Intel’s BayTrail do not include VT-x. Yes, normally this CPU includes VMX, but the variant in Chromebooks does not. Thus, unfortunately, they'll never be supported.

You can look up the board name in our public device list.

banjo

candy

clapper

enguarde

expresso

glimmer

gnawty

heli

kip

ninja

orco

quawks

squawks

sumo

swanky

winky

Old Kernels

There are no plans to support Linux 3.14 or older.

These require backports of new features that are extensive and often invasive. For example:

You can look up the board name in our public device list.

butterfly

falco

falco_li

leon

link

lumpy

mccloud

monroe

panther

parrot

parrot_ivb

peppy

stout

stumpy

tricky

wolf

x86-alex

x86-alex_he

x86-mario

x86-zgb

x86-zgb_he

zako

32-bit ARM CPUs

Getting virtual machines working under 32-bit ARM CPUs is difficult, non-standard, and requires coordination with the firmware. Unfortunately, Chrome OS firmware tended to not configure the extensions. We do not plan on supporting these systems, especially since they all tended to have smaller amounts of storage and RAM.

You can look up the board name in our public device list.

daisy

daisy_skate

daisy_spring

peach_pi

peach_pit

nyan_big

nyan_blaze

nyan_kitty

veyron_fievel

veyron_jaq

veyron_jerry

veyron_mickey

veyron_mighty

veyron_minnie

veyron_speedy

veyron_tiger

Glossary

9s : Server for the 9p file system protocol.

: Server for the 9p file system protocol. AMD-V (AMD Virtualization): AMD's marketing name for hardware virtualization extensions.

(AMD Virtualization): AMD's marketing name for hardware virtualization extensions. ARC (App Runtime for Chrome): The old/deprecated method of running Android apps in a Chrome NaCl (Native Client) sandbox. Had random compatibility issues.

(App Runtime for Chrome): The old/deprecated method of running Android apps in a Chrome NaCl (Native Client) sandbox. Had random compatibility issues. ARC++ (Android Runtime for Chrome [plus plus]): The current method for booting Android in a container under Chrome OS.

(Android Runtime for Chrome [plus plus]): The current method for booting Android in a container under Chrome OS. Cicerone : Chrome OS daemon that communicates with containers.

: Chrome OS daemon that communicates with containers. Concierge : Chrome OS daemon that manages VM/container life cycles.

: Chrome OS daemon that manages VM/container life cycles. Container : A package (tarball/filesystem image/etc...) full of programs ready to be executed with some levels of isolation.

: A package (tarball/filesystem image/etc...) full of programs ready to be executed with some levels of isolation. crosh (Chrome OS shell): A restricted developer shell for running a handful of commands.

(Chrome OS shell): A restricted developer shell for running a handful of commands. Crostini : An umbrella name for providing a polished UI experience to run Linux apps.

: An umbrella name for providing a polished UI experience to run Linux apps. crosvm : The Chrome OS Virtual Machine Monitor (akin to QEMU).

: The Chrome OS Virtual Machine Monitor (akin to QEMU). FUSE : Filesystem handling in userland which enables a wider variety of formats, remote filesystems, and improves overall security/stability.

: Filesystem handling in userland which enables a wider variety of formats, remote filesystems, and improves overall security/stability. Garcon : Daemon in the container for passing requests between the container and Chrome via Cicerone.

: Daemon in the container for passing requests between the container and Chrome via Cicerone. KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine): The Linux interface for managing virtual machines.

(Kernel Virtual Machine): The Linux interface for managing virtual machines. kvmtool : A simple/fast virtualization tool.

: A simple/fast virtualization tool. LXC / lxd : Linux container solution.

/ : Linux container solution. Maitred : Agent that runs inside the VM and manages containers.

: Agent that runs inside the VM and manages containers. QEMU : A large/complete virtual machine emulator.

: A large/complete virtual machine emulator. Seneschal : Chrome OS daemon that manages 9p servers.

: Chrome OS daemon that manages 9p servers. Sommelier : Wayland proxy compositor in the container that provides seamless forwarding of contents, input events, clipboard data, etc... between Linux apps and Chrome, and seamless X integration.

: Wayland proxy compositor in the container that provides seamless forwarding of contents, input events, clipboard data, etc... between Linux apps and Chrome, and seamless X integration. SVM (Secure Virtual Machine): AMD's short name for AMD-V.

(Secure Virtual Machine): AMD's short name for AMD-V. Termina : Codename for the custom VM that we boot.

: Codename for the custom VM that we boot. Terminal : Public name for getting a full Linux command line environment and running Crostini.

: Public name for getting a full Linux command line environment and running Crostini. userland : Everything not running inside of the kernel. Also known as user space.

: Everything not running inside of the kernel. Also known as user space. VM (Virtual Machine): A way to boot a different operating system in a strongly isolated environment.

(Virtual Machine): A way to boot a different operating system in a strongly isolated environment. vmc : crosh command to manually manage custom VM instances via Concierge.

: crosh command to manually manage custom VM instances via Concierge. VMX (Virtual Machine Extensions): Intel's short name for VT-x.

(Virtual Machine Extensions): Intel's short name for VT-x. vsh : Shell that runs inside the VM (not inside of the container).

: Shell that runs inside the VM (not inside of the container). VT-x (Virtualization Extensions): Intel's marketing name for hardware virtualization extensions.

(Virtualization Extensions): Intel's marketing name for hardware virtualization extensions. Wayland : The new graphics stack in the Linux world.

: The new graphics stack in the Linux world. WM (Window Manager): Program responsible for managing windows that other programs create. e.g. window borders, maximizing/minimizing, etc...

(Window Manager): Program responsible for managing windows that other programs create. e.g. window borders, maximizing/minimizing, etc... X : Umbrella term for the large classical project tasked with making graphics and inputs work in UNIX environments. May refer to the server, client, protocol, WM, or many other facets depending on context. a.k.a. X11, X.Org, and XFree86.

: Umbrella term for the large classical project tasked with making graphics and inputs work in UNIX environments. May refer to the server, client, protocol, WM, or many other facets depending on context. a.k.a. X11, X.Org, and XFree86. XWayland: An X server that outputs to Wayland.

FAQ

Where can I chat with developers?

All Chromium OS development discussions happen in our chromium-os-dev Google Group. Feel free to ask anything!

Where can I file feature requests?

As a nascent project, we‘ve got a lot on our plate and planning on releasing, so it’d be nice to hold off for now and check back in after a few Chrome OS releases.

Feel free to chat/ask on the mailing list above in the meantime.

Once we are in a more stable place, you can use our issue tracker. See the next question for details.

Where can I file bugs?

Please first make sure you're using the latest dev channel. A lot of work is still ongoing.

Next, please make sure the issue isn't already known or fixed. You can check the existing bug list.

If you still want to send feedback, you can file a feedback report and include #crostini in the description. Feedback about any part of Chrome OS can be filed with “Alt-Shift-i”.

If you still want to file a bug with the developers, use this link to route to the right people.

When will my device be supported?

We are not currently publishing any information beyond this document. If your device is not listed in the Device Support section, then we have not yet made any decisions for that specific device that are ready for the public.

So please do not ask us for device support roadmaps as we don't have them.

Do I need to enable developer mode?

There is no need to enable developer mode (where you see the scary screen at boot about OS verification being turned off). These features are all designed to run securely while your system is running in normal/verified mode.

For some devices you might have to switch to the dev channel, but that is entirely unrelated to developer mode.

Can I boot another OS like Windows, macOS, Linux, *BSD, etc...?

Currently, no, you can only boot our custom Linux VM named Termina. See also the next few questions.

Can I run my own VM/kernel?

Currently, no, you can only boot Termina which uses our custom Linux kernel and configs. Stay tuned!

Can I run a different Linux distro?

Of course! The full LXD command line is available, and the included images remote has lots of other distros to choose from. However, we don't test with anything other than the default container that we ship, so things may be broken when running another distro.

I'm running <insert distro here>, how do I get {GUI apps, launcher icons, etc...}?

Sommelier and Garcon binaries are bind-mounted into every container, so no need to install or cross-compile. The systemd units and config files from cros-container-guest-tools will start these daemons in a systemd user session. It's also a good idea to run loginctl enable-linger <user> to allow these to remain running in the background.

Am I running Crostini?

If you're using the Terminal app, or programs in the default container we provide that includes our programs to ease integration (e.g. Sommelier), then yes.

If you're running your own container or VM, then no.

How do I share files between Chrome OS & the container?

The default Crostini container's storage is accessible under “Linux Files” in the Chrome OS Files app. Using Secure Shell, you can set up a SFTP mount to the other remote containers and then browse via the Files app as well.

Can I access files when the container isn't running?

Currently, the container must be running in order to access its content. The default Crostini container will be started automatically when “Linux Files” is accessed from the Files app.

Can I install custom kernel modules?

Currently, no, Termina does not include module support. That means trying to use software that requires building or loading custom kernel modules (e.g. VirtualBox) will not work. See the next question too.

Can I mount filesystems?

Currently, no (*). The containers are implemented using Linux user namespaces and those are quite restricted (by design).

See the FUSE support entry for alternatives.

(*): Technically you can mount a few limited pseudo filesystems (like memory-backed tmpfs), but most people aren't interested in those.

Is FUSE supported?

Yes, starting with M73. Note that unprivileged containers can‘t set up loopback mounts (see the next question), so your FUSE driver of choice can’t require a block device.

Can I use loop devices?

Currently, no. See the previous question about mounting filesystems.

Specifically, we're referring to losetup and mount -o loop which use /dev/loop-control and nodes like /dev/loop0 via the loop kernel module.

If you have a use case that wouldn't be solved by supporting FUSE, please file a bug for us.

Can I run a VM inside the VM?

Currently, no, nested KVM is not supported. You could run qemu-system to emulate the hardware and boot whatever OS you want inside of that. Unfortunately, it‘ll be quite slow as QEMU won’t be able to utilize KVM for hardware acceleration.

Can I run a container inside the container?

Yes! You'll probably need to install the relevant packages first for whatever container format you want to run.

What container formats are supported?

Termina currently only supports LXC directly. We're aware of Kubernetes/Docker/OCI/rkt/etc... and hope to make them all easy to use.

See the previous question for a workaround in the mean time.

What architecture works on my system?

Since everything is all native code execution, it depends on the device you have.

If you don't know what device you have, you can find this out in two different ways:

Open chrome://settings/help/details and look at the Platform, then match the board name with our public device list. Look at the “User ABI” field to see what kind of CPU you have.

Open up crosh and run uname -m . This will print the architecture of your current device.

If you see x86_64 , you'll be able to run code compiled for Intel/AMD (32-bit/64-bit/x32 should all work).

If you see arm (or something similar like armv7l ) or aarch64 , you'll be able to run code compiled for ARM/ARM64.

Can I run other architectures?

There is currently no integrated support for running e.g. ARM code on an Intel system, or vice-versa. You could handle this yourself (e.g. by using qemu-user), but if you're familiar with qemu-user, then you already know that :).

How many VMs can I run?

You can spawn as many as your system can handle (RAM/CPU-wise). They are all independent of each other.

How many containers can I run?

You can spawn as many as your system can handle (RAM/CPU-wise). Each VM instance can host multiple containers.

Can I run programs that keep running after logout?

Nope! All VMs (and their containers) are tied to your login session. As soon as you log out, all programs are shut down/killed by design.

Since all your data lives in your encrypted home, we wouldn't want that to possibly leak when you log out.

For more details, see the Security section in this doc.

Can I autorun programs when I log in?

Nope! All VMs (and their containers) need to be manually relaunched. This helps prevent persistent exploits.

For more details, see the Security section in this doc.

Can I autorun programs when I boot?

Nope! See the previous questions, and the Security section.

Can I set environment variables for my container?

Sure! There are a few ways to do this.

environment.d lets you set environment variables for your systemd --user session, which includes the Terminal and all GUI apps. You may need a newer container, Debian 10 “buster”, to use this method.

session, which includes the Terminal and all GUI apps. You may need a newer container, Debian 10 “buster”, to use this method. If you just want environment variables in your Terminal, set those in your shell's config file, such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc .

Changes to environment variables only take effect for newly started programs. You may also need to restart programs or the entire container for any changes to take effect.

Is multiprofile supported?

No, Terminal is only supported in the primary profile (*). Our goal is to have a fully functional and smooth experience for the primary profile, and to not crash or cause problems in secondary profiles. We don't plan on making secondary profiles more featureful.

If you're unfamiliar with multiprofile support, check out the general multiprofile documentation for more details.

(*): The Terminal application is disabled in all secondary profiles. People can manually start VMs via crosh and containers therein, but the UI and Files app probably won't work integrate automatically.

Are child accounts supported?

No, Terminal is not supported in child accounts. We don't have plans to make this available to such accounts.

If you're unfamiliar with child accounts, check out the general child accounts documentation for more details.

Are my VMs/containers/data synced/backed up?

Currently, no, nothing is synced or backed up. You're responsible for any data going into the containers.

We hope to improve this situation greatly.

How can I backup a VM?

If you want to back up an individual container, you can use the standard LXC commands. This is the preferred method for saving the state of Crostini.

The vmc export command can be used to export an entire VM manually. It will dump the qcow2 disk image to the Downloads folder by default. Note that there isn't yet a way to import a VM, so this is only useful for diagnostics or using another system to extract files.

Can I access the VM/container files directly (e.g. via the Files app)?

Currently, no, there is no way to access the image files used by the VM. There are no plans to change this.

If you want to back things up, you'll need to do so by hand.

Why is the time inside the VM/container out of sync?

The clock inside of the VM (and by extension, the containers) is automatically kept in sync with Chrome OS's clock. So you do not have to run time keeping services yourself (e.g. ntp). That clock is based off of UTC.

Starting with R75, we attempt to sync timezone data into the container via timedatectl. If that doesn't work, we fallback with exporting the TZ environment variable.

We don‘t currently update the timezone details inside the VM itself. We also don’t try to update any other timezone setting as they are non-standard across distros. So the time might appear to be wrong at a glance in those environments, or stale if the TZ environment variable is used.

See https://crbug.com/829934 for some extended technical details. It's more complicated than you might think!

What copy & paste formats are supported?

Currently, only text/plain content is supported. We plan on adding more formats soon (e.g. image/png and text/rtf ).

You can see the current supported list in exo/data_source.cc.

While X/Wayland support an arbitrary number of MIME formats, our ultimate goal is to only support all the formats that Chrome itself does. See the clipboard_constants.cc file for that list.

Note that we're only talking about constraints on data stored in the clipboard. Wayland apps are still free to transfer data directly between themselves in whatever arbitrary format they like.

Can I read/write the clipboard automatically from inside the VM?

Currently, no.

From a security point of view, we don‘t want untrusted code silently or automatically extracting whatever the user has copied. Perhaps your browser session is copying personal data or passwords. It’s the same problem that the web platform runs into.

This is not the same thing as users manually pasting data (e.g. Ctrl-V). This is only about programmatic reading.

We don't expect it to stay this way forever. Once we have a permission model and UI to manage these things, we can look into allowing users to grant this permission.

If you use xclip or X tools, they often have a local buffer (in XWayland), but it won't automatically sync with the rest of the system.

Do I have to manage VM updates?

Nope! The Termina VM is a component that is updated automatically.

Keep in mind that the VM is separate from the container.

How do I check the Termina version?

Since Termina is a downloaded component, you can visit chrome://components and look for cros-termina .

You can also connect to a VM via vsh and run cat /etc/lsb-release .

Do I have to manage container updates?

The Google provided packages in the container that communicate with Chrome OS or are required for Chrome OS integration will be automatically updated on a regular basis. This will install/upgrade any necessary dependencies automatically.

Package updates due to security fixes will automatically be installed for you.

There is no automatic upgrading of other installed packages in the container. We‘d rather avoid updating packages that might break programs already installed. The container is like any other Linux distro out there, so you’ll need to update it from time to time if you want newer software. But if you‘re happy with things as they are, and stable is better than shiny, then you don’t need to worry about ever having to manually manage the system.

If you're looking for a quick recipe to pull in the latest shiny versions, run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade .

If you want to control any automatic package updates, edit the file ~/.config/cros-garcon.conf . It is automatically installed for new users, and includes documentation inline. Be warned: disabling automatic updates can break integration with CrOS.

Can I use IPv6?

Yes, starting with R81. Both dual-stack and IPv6-only networks are supported.

Chrome OS only supports SLAAC; read more in the support page for IPv6 support on Chrome OS.

Can I access layer 2 networking?

Currently, no, networking access is only at layer 3 (i.e. IP). So you won't be able to do any bridging or lower level fun stuff.

It‘s not clear if/when this will change. Bridging with the outside world is difficult with WiFi, and not many devices have Ethernet connections. We could support layer 2 between containers, but it’s not clear how many people want this in order to justify the effort involved.

Do VPNs set up by CrOS/Android (outside of the VM/containers) work?

Currently, no. You can star https://crbug.com/834585 for updates.

Is audio output supported?

Yes, starting with R74 (Termina version 11707.0.0+).

If you set up your container before audio support was deployed, it might not be configured correctly (as the default before was to output to the null device). You can try these steps to recover:

# Make sure the new cros-pulse-config package is installed. $ sudo apt - get update $ sudo apt - get dist - upgrade # Clear out existing pulse settings. $ rm - rf ~/. config / pulse # Turn it off & on again via crosh (Ctrl-Alt-T). crosh > vmc stop termina

Is audio capture (e.g. microphone) supported?

It's an experimental feature in R79+ images. You need to enable audio capture (without permission model) from crosh.

# Use Ctrl-Alt-T to open crosh crosh > vmc stop termina crosh > vmc start termina -- enable - audio - capture

You can star https://crbug.com/932268 for more updates.

Can I access hardware (e.g. USB/Bluetooth/serial)?

Currently, no, but we are working on it. Stay tuned!

Can I run graphical applications?

Yes, but currently things are unaccelerated. So if you‘re looking to play the latest Quake game, it’s not going to work well. See the next few questions.

Can I run Wayland programs?

Yes, and in fact, these are preferred! Chrome itself deals with Wayland clients heavily, and so you're much more likely to have things “just work” if you upgrade.

Sommelier provides this support seamlessly.

Can I run X programs?

Yes, although you might run into some compatibility kinks, and it probably will never be as perfect as running a traditional X server. However, with the wider community moving to Wayland, it should be good enough.

Sommelier takes care of launching XWayland, acting as the WM, and otherwise translating X and Wayland requests between Chrome and the X programs.

Why are windows sometimes tiny/fuzzy?

While Chrome supports high DPI displays, many Linux applications don‘t. When a program doesn’t properly support DPI scaling, poor results follow.

Currently we expose the native resolution and DPI directly to applications. If they show up tiny or fuzzy, it‘s because they don’t support scaling properly. You should report these issues to the respective upstream projects so that, hopefully someday, it'll “just work”.

In the mean time, Sommelier exposes some runtime settings so you can set the scale factor on a per-program basis to work around the misbehavior. Check out Sommelier's documentation for more details.

If you're applying a system-wide zoom or otherwise changing the default display resolution, we attempt to scale the application output to match. This can lead to blurry results. You can adjust the resolution of your display, or tweak things via Sommelier (see above for more details).

Will synergy work?

Synergy will not work (as a client or server). It requires capturing and spoofing inputs (e.g. mouse/keyboard) for all windows. Since we‘re built on top of Wayland, by design, one client cannot get access to any other client on the system. This is a strong security boundary between clients as we don’t want arbitrary code running inside of a container being able to break out and attack other clients (like the browser) and sending arbitrary keystrokes.

There are no plans to ever enable this kind of control from the container. This isn‘t to say a synergy-like solution will never happen in Chrome OS (e.g. something like CRD), just that the solution won’t be synergy or any other tool in a container.

You can run synergy, and probably get it to convey input events for the single window that it‘s running under, but that’s as close as you'll get.

Can I run Windows programs?

Sure, give WINE a try. Compatibility will largely depend on WINE though, so please don't ask us for support.

Can I run Steam?

Sure, give Steam a shot. Just remember that without accelerated graphics or sound, it's probably not going to be too much fun.

Can I run macOS programs?

Probably not. You could try various existing Linux solutions, but chances are good that they are even rougher around the edges.

Can I develop Android apps (for ARC++)?

Check out the Android Studio site for more details on this.

Why implement crosvm from scratch (instead of using QEMU/kvmtool/etc...)?

We have nothing against any of these other projects. In fact, they're all pretty great, and their designs influenced ours. Most significantly, they did more than we needed and did not have as good a security model as we were able to attain by writing our own. While crosvm cannot do everything those other projects can, it does only what we need it to.

For more details, check out the crosvm project.

Why run VMs? Aren't containers secure?

While containers often isolate themselves (via Linux namespaces), they do not isolate the kernel or similar system resources. That means it only takes a single bug in the kernel to fully exploit the system and steal your data.

That isn't good enough for Chrome OS, hence we put everything inside a VM. Now you have to exploit crosvm via its limited interactions with the guest, and crosvm itself is heavily sandboxed.

For more details, see the Security section in this doc.

Don't Android apps (ARC++) run in a container and not a VM?

Unfortunately, yes, Android apps currently run only in a container.

We try to isolate them quite a bit (using namespaces, seccomp, alt syscall, SELinux, etc...), but at the end of the day, they have direct access to many syscalls and kernel interfaces, so a bug in there is reachable via code compiled with Android's NDK.

If Android apps are in a container, why can't users run code too?

We don't usually accept a low security bar in one place as a valid reason to lower the security bar everywhere. Instead, we want to constantly raise the security bar for all code.

Are Android apps (ARC++) going away?

There are no plans to merge the two projects. We share/re-use a lot of the Chrome bridge code though, so it‘s not like we’re doing everything from scratch.

Don't VMs slow everything down?

It is certainly true that VMs add overhead when compared to running in only a container or directly in the system. However, in our tests, the overhead is negligble to the user experience, and well worth the strong gains in system security.

For more details, see the Security section in this doc.

Why run containers inside the VM? Why not run programs directly in the VM?

In order to keep VM startup times low, we need Termina to be as slim as possible. That means cutting out programs/files we don't need or are about.

We use dm-verity which requires the Termina image be read-only for Security, but it also means we can safely share it between VM instances.

Further, the versions of programs/libraries we ship are frequently newer than other distros (since we build off of Gentoo), and are compiled with extra security flags.

Allowing user modifications to the VM prevents a stateless image that always works and is otherwise immune from user mistakes and bugs in programs.

Altogether, it's difficult to support running arbitrary programs, and would result in a system lacking many desired properties outlined above. Forcing everything into a container produces a more robust solution, and allows users to freely experiment without worry.

Also, we love turtles.

Is Foreshadow (a.k.a. L1TF / CVE-2018-3646) handled?

Yes. For more details, see our public documentation.

Can I delete containers I no longer want?

Sure, feel free to delete whatever you want. However, there is no UI or commands currently to help with this.

Note: The default Crostini container is named penguin .

Can I delete VMs I no longer want?

Sure, feel free to delete whatever you want. The vmc destroy command can be used to delete them manually.

Note: The default Crostini VM is named termina .

Can I disable these features?

Administrators can control access to containers/VMs via the management console, so enterprise/education organizations that want to limit this can.

Initially there is a “Linux (Beta)” option under the standard Chrome OS settings, but the long-term plan is to remove this knob so things work on-demand. At which point, there will be no knob for unmanaged devices.

Why the name Crostini?

It's a play off crouton which is a project to easily create full Linux environments (including developer tools) for users who turned on developer mode. Crostini aims to satisfy the majority of use cases covered by crouton, and is a larger & tastier snack than a crouton, hence the name.

How is Crostini related to Crouton?

crouton helped define many of the use cases that developers wanted with Chrome OS, so it helped guide Crostini from a requirements perspective. We wanted to make sure that the majority of crouton users would be able to use Crostini instead for their needs, but in a secure environment.

So crouton helped inspire the direction of Crostini, but no code has been shared or reused between the two. It‘s not that crouton is bad, it’s simply a completely different model.