Dylan Callahan from the Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 project today informs Softpedia, exclusively, about the immediate availability for download of the fourth release of their Chromium OS port for the popular SBC.

Dubbed "Lenny Bruce," Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.4 is a massive release when compared with the 0.3 version, and among some noteworthy changes, we can mention huge performance improvements by drastically tweaking the kernel with features like the OnDemand governor, a custom BFS scheduler optimized for desktop systems, LZ4 compression, and many latency improvements.

But the kernel is not the only component that received attention in Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.4, as the developers also managed to improve the storage by implementing mount support without atime for slower microSD cards, along with read/write access latency improvements thanks to the implementation of a BFQ scheduler. Trim support is also available in version 0.4, and the available free space on the stateful partition has been increased from 200MB to 2GB.

"Lenny Bruce is the most performance driven release we have made since the beginning of the project. We are so thankful that the community appreciates this project and supports us. It makes developing for this project feel worth the time and energy we put into it. We hope that people will enjoy the newest release. Our project is still very young, but I hope this release shows that were maturing," said the devs exclusively for Softpedia.

User experience enhancements, known issues

Besides the neat features mentioned above, Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.4 launches today with multiple user experience (UX) enhancements, among which we can mention simplified Google account login (users still need to manually set the time for surfing the Web) , automatic time synchronization during boot, zRAM activated by default, thus allowing users to open three times as many tabs as before, and, of course, tons of stability improvements by rebasing the OS on the stable R49 branch of the upstream ChromeOS.

As expected, there are some known issues present in this release, and we're informing users that things like Netflix, Wi-Fi, Low-Fi TVs and TVs with SD resolutions, YouTube 4K HFR videos, and automatic screen rotation don't work. They will be fixed in upcoming releases, but until then, you can now enjoy the new Chromium OS for Raspberry Pi 2 0.4 release by downloading the binary image for your Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computer, which requires an SD card of 8GB or higher capacity.

Just thought we'd tease a few of the core features of 0.4 "Lenny Bruce" pic.twitter.com/NGWDx4aot3 — ChromiumRPI (@ChromiumRaspPI) February 16, 2016