Chromium OS for SBCs project, through Dylan Callahan, informs Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computers.

Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 3 appears to be the first of its kind, and it comes hot on the heels of the version 0.5 of the Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 port announced on Softpedia exclusively, bringing users a separate binary image to ensure everything works as expected (read the last paragraph for known issues) for the new generation of SBCs.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B has been released on the last day of February 2016, on the 29th, and it brought in the long-anticipated built-on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support, along with a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor. Therefore, the Chromium OS for SBC project has successfully ported Chromium OS to Raspberry Pi 3 devices.

What's new in Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 3 version 0.5

Don't be fooled by the version number, because there was no previous version of Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 3, as the team just wanted for this port to be on par with the one for Raspberry Pi 2 boards. Therefore, it includes many of the new features and improvements introduced by Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.5.

Among these, we can mention the Linux 4.2.8-ckt8 kernel with a reduced size, BFS tweaks for improved latency, less debugging output, and without dynamic ticks, multiple improvements to the sound driver, as well as better storage performance, mostly thanks to the new BFQ hierarchical scheduler and ondemand governor tweaks.

The user experience has been improved as well, offering users fixes for the Kiosk Mode and better overall performance, there are also several small video improvements, in particular, fixes to the VC4 GPU driver and various video modes, especially for those running Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 3 on non-1080p displays.

There are some known limitations, though, for this first release of the Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 3 port, such as the fact that the on-board Wi-Fi of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B computer is not yet supported, Netflix videos cannot be played, and HTML5 playback works only on websites that also offer Flash as an alternative to HTML5 video.

You can download the Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 3 0.5 binary image right now from the project's website. Oh, and the team has informed us that they are about to start development on porting Chromium OS to the PINE64 single-board computer, which should be available in the coming weeks.