New OS versions for different boards

Product support balenaOS
1

Hi,
I’m just curious why some boards are stuck with no option to update balenaOS?
E.g. we have flashed a few RevPi Connect 4 devices and all of them are using balenaOS 5.3.3
If I want to upgrade OS, I only see two options 5.4.0 and 5.4.0+rev1 but I can’t select them, as both have a warning icon (regarding a noProxy setting).
image

So, I’m asking myself what might be the trigger for Balena to also provide up-to-date images basically non Raspberry Pi boards (that usually get very frequently new images).

Thanks a lot for clarification!

Fritz

2

Hi @fritz,

It’s a good question for sure. There are a couple of things at play…

  • In the past, we had to do manual testing for each version of our OS for every single device type we supported
  • This wasn’t scalable and when we hit 100 device types, we just had to come up with something new
  • So we created something called “AutoKit”, which allows us to put hardware in our CI/CD pipeline and test hardware automatically with every new OS release (you can read more about it in this blogpost)
  • Despite having released AutoKit, we are adding new hardware each month while still trying to catch up getting the old hardware added into the automation workflow
  • We’re also changing our old CI/CD pipeline to something new, and that’s taken a lot of the team’s time away from catching up
  • On top of that, the old pipeline configuration didn’t offer us a way to receive notifications when one of the tests for a device failed, so sometimes we’ll have a device failing tests and we aren’t aware of it

All of that context shared - the RevPi Connect 4 is a newer device, so it’s in our AutoKit, but it’s been failing some tests and we missed it (thank you for making us aware!).

As for the error message, unfortunately the last test the RevPi Connect 4 passed was for an OS version we’ve had to invalidate due to a bug that we deemed problematic enough that new devices shouldn’t use it (the note is there for customers who have already used that version and now can’t, so that they know why it’s been invalidated).

So, there are a lot of reasons for the exact scenario you’re seeing, and sorry to send such a long answer to a short question, but I hope it helps. :sweat_smile: Let me know if that brings up any other questions for you.

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3

Oh, and maybe more helpfully, I’ve reached out to the team that manages our devices in the pipeline and we’re looking into the failures so we can get the latest version out to you soon. :slight_smile:

4

Hi @the-real-kenna,
thanks a lot, appreciating your detailed answer!
Looking forward for fresh releases in the future!
Thanks,
Fritz

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