Abstract
Cubic surfaces in characteristic two are investigated from the point of view of prime characteristic commutative algebra. In particular, we prove that the non-Frobenius split cubic surfaces form a linear subspace of codimension four in the 19-dimensional space of all cubics, and that up to projective equivalence, there are finitely many non-Frobenius split cubic surfaces. We explicitly describe defining equations for each and characterize them as extremal in terms of configurations of lines on them. In particular, a (possibly singular) cubic surface in characteristic two fails to be Frobenius split if and only if no three lines on it form a “triangle”.