Google seems to want to bring Windows 10 to Chromebooks with ‘Campfire’

Evidence has emerged that Google is working on a project called Campfire. That seems to be intended to give Chromebooks dual-boot functionality so they can run Windows 10 alongside Chrome OS.

With Project Campfire, Google appears to be working on a project similar to Apple’s Boot Camp, XDA Developers claims based on multiple commits to Chromium Gerrit. They mention the existence of different variants of Campfire, which are integrated in the master branch of Chromium. This indicates that it is not a single model that will receive support, but multiple Chromebooks.

In addition, Google seems to be striving for broad application of the dual boot option. To activate Campfire, the user does not have to start up his Chromebook in Developer Mode, which is often required for advanced functionality. In addition, Google enables automatic updating of the RW_Legacy section of a Chromebook ROM so that a user does not have to bother with flashing firmware to enable dualboot.

The dual boot option previously appeared as Alt OS mode and then appeared to be intended to allow another operating system to run on a Pixelbook. After that, indications appeared that it mainly concerned running Windows 10 and that it was more than an internal project.

Older Chromebooks probably won’t be able to run Windows 10. Laptops should probably have at least 40GB of storage capacity, of which 30GB for Windows and 10GB for Chrome OS. Older Chromebooks often had 16GB of storage, and even much more recent models don’t qualify with their 32GB. This concerns soldered emmc storage, which cannot be replaced or expanded.

Google Pixelbook