Google-only hardware
Google's laptops carry a security chip and run a protected VM. An ordinary laptop has neither, so services that wait for them would hang the boot. Each one is hidden or replaced.
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| "System process not responding" | LockSettings waits forever for the Weaver service, which lives in Trusty. | Weaver's declaration is hidden from the manifest. |
| Setup crashes: "Failed to create shared Bitmap" | No /dev/ashmem (the Rust ashmem driver is not built). | A small shim implements the ashmem ioctls on top of memfd. |
| Setting a password hangs Settings | Gatekeeper is in Trusty and never answers. | A software Gatekeeper (soft_gk). |
| keystore2 aborts, KeyMint hangs | KeyMint and StrongBox need the security chip. | A patched libkm_compat (software KeyMint); the StrongBox APEX is hidden. |
| Linux Terminal VM never starts | Secretkeeper is in Trusty. | Its declaration is hidden. |
| Logs truncated, stick corrupted | Android's volume daemon ran a filesystem check on the stick while mounted. | The USB rule is removed from the fstab so Android never touches the stick. |
| No sound | Google uses SOF; a laptop's own audio is usually legacy HDA. | The audio HAL configuration is replaced (see Hardware detection). |
| White veil, lifted blacks | Google's display compositor loads a gamma curve meant for its own graphics driver into i915 every frame. | i915 ignores userspace gamma, degamma and colour matrices; the panel is treated as full-range sRGB. |
| Everything too big | Google's panel is set for density 260. | RESOLUTION and DENSITY in gbos.cfg. |
The consequence of the colour fix: Night Light has no effect, because the gamma tables it uses are ignored on purpose.
Drivers Google's modules cannot provide
Google's vendor kernel modules are built for Google's kernel and do not load on this one. Battery and AC, the Intel LPSS I2C controller (touchpad) and legacy HDA audio are therefore built into the gbOS86 kernel; the rest are loadable modules found by hardware detection.