This repo contains scripts for building a database of all Chrome OS recovery images. The generated data is located at the chromeos-releases-data repo, which is updated daily.
Chrome OS recovery images are used to reinstall or upgrade the operating system on Chromebooks. You can use them to repair a broken installation, or downgrade to older versions. Downgrading Chrome OS can allow for older bugs and vulnerabilities to be used, which is useful if you are trying to jailbreak the device.
However, Google only makes the newest recovery images available, making it difficult to find older builds. To obtain a list of older recovery images as well as download links, we get this data from two sources:
- Historical data for recovery images is fetched from the chrome-versions NPM package. This old database used a convoluted method of brute forcing download URLs and is no longer kept up to date.
- Newer data comes from parsing archived snapshots of the Chromium Serving Builds API and the Recovery API. Snapshots are taken daily, so it includes the data for every single recovery image since 2024.
You need to run this on a Linux system, due to dependencies on vboot-kernel-utils and binwalk.
To start, clone this repository, create a Python venv, and install dependencies:
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -e .
Install vboot-kernel-utils (needed for the futility command) busybox, pcregrep, and binwalk:
sudo apt install vboot-kernel-utils busybox binwalk pcregrep
Run the script:
python3 -m cros_releases
Generated data will be located at data/data.json. Note that the script will download several TB of data on the first run to determine the kernel version for recovery images.
MercuryWorkshop/chromeos-releases: Database for Chrome OS release info and download URLs
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