Edit: There's also Crouton, for an intermediate option that does need developer mode.
You can even run docker/containerd inside the LXD container.
Now the question is has anyone tried running everything above with chromeos flex inside a vm with nested virtualization!
However in my mind it was all paid back to me 100 fold when a customs officer at an international border tried to open my laptop and examine it, but was subjected to the sonic-boom beeping of dev mode boot timeout.
When the hardware supports it (most often true these days), you can run nested virtualization: KVM (inside LXD) inside KVM. That will get you an arbitrary VM image.
They might relax the "Termina VMs only" policy later, but that depends on a bunch more security spending.
Either way, it doesn't matter, I'd expect whatever is running in ChromeOS (Linux Kernel) to be replaced by Fuchsia (Zircon kernel) underneath. They will more likely keep the 'ChromeOS' name to limit the confusion and that will be what these devices like that $100 Chromebook will be running in the future.
So it will be even more locked down and tightly controlled.
I mean, that would make sense. But being Google, I think they're likely to name it something different that nobody recognizes. And then change that name to something similar enough to ChromeOS to cause confusion, since they're actually separate and incompatible products.
Sigh. Sorry, I used to work for Google, on chat and video chat products.
There is zero chance that Zircon will be faster than Linux.
The classic example is Mach from CMU:
"When Mach was first being seriously used in the 2.x versions, performance was slower than traditional monolithic operating systems, perhaps as much as 25%... When Mach 3 attempted to move most of the operating system into user-space, the overhead became higher still: benchmarks between Mach and Ultrix on a MIPS R3000 showed a performance hit as great as 67% on some workloads."
https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/sel4/frequently-asked-que...
That is why QNX and INTEGRITY have no sales.
Linux performance is so beyond what everyone else can achieve that is why nowadays we run it virtualized and pack applications into containers.
Ah, no. It is very much specifically in a container inside a VM. Now, full credit where it's due: You're unlikely to notice. Performance is good, they've done work integrating it (filesystem integration, forwarding windows to the host display servers through Sommelier). But native it is not.
(Details: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con...)
EDIT: I guess I should mention; this does come up occasionally in ways that can actually matter. IIRC I got bit by the (default?) container setup not allowing you to ptrace, you can't mount filesystems or loop devices (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con...), and you can't touch the kernel or hardware (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con... and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/HEAD/con... ).