Safety and limits

Your data

• Installing erases the whole internal NVMe drive (Windows, files, every partition). The only guard is typing the drive's serial number, which appears on the laptop's own screen. There is no way to skip it.
• Live mode never writes to the internal drive.
• Update keeps your data but does change the system files; back up anything important first.
• FAT filesystems have no journal. Always shut down from Android's power menu.

Security

• SELinux runs in permissive mode and the security services (Gatekeeper, KeyMint) are software stand-ins. Do not treat this as a secure device: keys are not hardware-backed and the lock screen is only as strong as its software.
• Secure Boot must be off, so the boot chain is not verified.
• The CPU emulator runs inside the kernel; a bug there is a kernel bug.

Compatibility limits

• Intel x86-64 only. No AMD CPUs, no ARM.
• Installing needs an internal NVMe drive (live mode works without).
• Suspend and resume, fingerprint readers, IPU6 cameras and discrete GPUs are not supported.
• Seven laptops have been tried, three of them fully working; see Tested laptops. Anything not on that list is untested.

Legal

gbOS86 is an independent community project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Google. Googlebook OS, Android and Chrome are Google's. The built image contains Google's OS and is not redistributed. The source repository includes a small number of patched Google libraries (a patched libz, libcrypto and a software KeyMint library) that the build requires; Google's own terms apply to them.