OS Upgrade in OpenBalena

How are OS upgrades handled in OpenBalena? Is the SDK startOsUpdate command supported?

Thanks

Hi, OpenBalena doesn’t support OS upgrades remotely, so that command is not supported.

Hi @karaxuna,

Sorry for hijacking this thread btw, but is there any way to update the Host OS when using openBalena? Because else, if we want to use openBalena, we can’t update our fleet’s HostOS remotely, which isn’t really do-able…

Hi @bversluijs ,

Host updates on balenaCloud are carried out by downloading these updates from its registries. These don’t exist on openBalena, so currently there’s now way to remotely update a device using openBalena to a new version of balenaOS.

We do have plans to support this in the future, but this is dependent on other functionality that has not yet been finalised, so unfortunately I can’t give you any sort of ETA.

Best regards,

Heds

Is there anything we (the community) can do to help you with this? I’ll love to contribute.

Hi,
Thank you for the offer, I pinged the open source team to ask where they could need help. They will update this thread.

Hi @gmerciel, it needs some more work internally to get into a position where we can start opening this up. Thanks for the offer!

Has anyone tried going the https://mender.io route to get OS Upgrade in combination with OpenBalena? It would probably be a bit cumbersome to run both the Mender and OpenBalena server components. But would it work?

Hi!

Thanks for the suggestion, but going the mender route is not something we are currently considering. OS Upgrade for OpenBalena is something we have plans to support in the future, but using our own implementation.

Regards
Alida

Hi,

Is there any update regarding this feature, because I’ve been advised to avoid openBalena until this feature is implemented. Because it isn’t clear if a host OS update is necessary for it to work in the future.

This is our main concern and obstacle for using and developing for openBalena.

Hi Bart, I will check with the Open Source team and we will let you know, thanks!

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Hey,

I understand your reservations about deploying with openBalena whilst there is no official HUP support. I am sorry that we don’t have any external progress on this topic yet, but it is something we are dedicated to deliver but our focus isn’t entirely on this area right now.

Is there a compelling reason not to go with balenaCloud in the meantime, until HUP support is announced?

Hi Rich,

The reason for not using balenaCloud is that some of our projects are based on fixed costs per month instead of costs per device. Off course we’ve tried to make it fit in our budget for these projects, but it simply isn’t possible for this project (We use balenaCloud for another project where it fits in our budget).

But we love Balena and would like to use it for all of our projects and help the open source project! And we’re on the verge of choosing an OS for version 2.0 of one of our projects, but lack of official HUP support is a real deal-breaker, because the devices will be placed all over the world without (technical) people that can fix problems if they occur.

So we’re looking for solutions around this problem and maybe you guys can help and come up with a solution so we’re still able to use Balena for this (and future) projects? :slight_smile: