We are planning to discontinue support for certain device types, and your organization currently has one or more active devices on that list.
Your existing devices will continue to operate as they do today. However, no new balenaOS releases will be published for these device types, and they will no longer appear in the dashboard when creating new fleets. Devices of a discontinued type can still be added to existing fleets, but over time, discontinued devices will fall behind the minimum supported balenaOS and balenaCloud versions. This can eventually impact compatibility and access to new platform features.
The discontinuation date for this batch is March 1, 2026. You can continue using your existing devices, or begin planning a migration to a currently supported device type. Our team can help you identify a path that best fits your deployment, please reach out through existing support channels or directly at solutions@balena.io.
You can review the full discontinuation details, including the specific device types affected and the criteria behind these decisions, by clicking here.
Thanks,
â The balena Team
What does this actually mean, we have quite some devices in the field which are based on Jetson Nano. Either using the default SD/eMMC device type or Photon Nano and Xavier NX. We will definitely not replace these devices for the years to come.
What this means, is that we wonât be publishing new versions of balenaOS for these device types. They will continue to work as they have been, but there will be no future opportunities to update the hostOS beyond whatever the current latest version is.
The implications of releasing no further OS versions are that new OS features and fixes will not be available. There is also an eventual risk, that the minimum version of balenaOS that works with balena cloud will eventually be higher than an OS version that is available for that device type.
Thatâs interesting. We are starting to use Balena and so far it has been great.
But when you deploy devices in the field with an OS like BalenaOS, you need to have visibility in terms of support discontinuation to manage your fleet properly.
Do you have the dates on which you plan to discontinue support for the currently supported devices ?
Example, when are you going to discontinue the support for the CM4 ?
@rcooke-warwick What are the reasons for not being able to update for the photon-nano and photon-xavier-nx. @acostach is this due to NVIDIA does not update there l4t anymore for this family? Or are there possibilities to update these devices as Nvidia Jetson Nano eMMCseem to be running fine on BalenaOS 6.x
Our device fleet is scattered and will not be replaced by new devices. Therefore, we need to maintain these devices until they are phased out which could take some years. So for us its unacceptable that these devices will eventually disappear from BalenaCloud.
To be very explicit on the key point, there is no plan for these devices to be removed from balenaCloud, and nothing about this change implies that existing devices will suddenly disappear or stop being manageable. In any foreseeable future, devices that are already deployed will remain visible, accessible, and operable in balenaCloud.
When my colleague mentioned a theoretical risk of incompatibility, this is not a near- or medium-term expectation. It refers to very long-term scenarios, such as major architectural or security model changes across the platform, combined with a lack of upstream OS support. Think years down the line, not something you need to plan around now.
When a device is âdiscontinuedâ from the Balena Cloud, is the source code retained on GitHub so a user is still able to produce updated BalenaOS versions and retain compatibility for the board? (Understood that there would be no support)
What is Balenaâs policy around âcustomâ BalenaOS builds? It seems like right now, you can hook up any BalenaOS device as long as the architecture matches the fleet, which allows custom devices to continue to exist (again, at our own risk). Is this something the team realizes is possible and will not break in the future?
More generally, I think itâs fairly important for fleet owners that, if you pick a device based on hardware compatibility with Balena, it doesnât disappear from underneath you. At the moment, itâs hard to tell which devices qualify for which criteria. For example, we have no way of knowing if a device is >500 devices, or if itâs being privately paid for by a Balena customer. At the moment, this means weâd risk developing a hardware product around something which later loses support.
I noticed that the some of the devices we use in production are marked as discontinued and removed from the source code. The devices and their versions are the following
NVIDIA Jetson Nano eMMC (6.5.38)
NVIDIA Jetson Nano SD-card (4.0.9+rev2)
Photon Nano (4.0.9)
Photon Xavier NX (4.0.9+rev2)
For the Photon devices its not even possible to download the BalenaOS images from BalenaCloud anymore. Balena basically forces us to stop using these devices which is unacceptable.
Furthermore, as the Nano eMMC device is running 6.5.38 I donât see any reason why the other devices could not run on the 6.x version (just as Auvidea JN30B).
@floion, @joehounsham we could just as easily contribute these photon device types again based on the latest available BSP (r32.7.6), this was still something on the to-do list.
@remsol For the photon images, you need to check âshow discontinutedâ, youâll still be able to download OS images that way. The reason they were discontinued was due to there being only a handful of active devices on the balena platform, and the second reason being they were community-maintained, which we tightened up last year by discontinuing devices that were not being actively maintained by the community.
We could explore bringing the Photons back into official support if there is sufficient demand. But allowing community board support is something we have had to pause for now due to the high number of device types that werenât being maintained. This was putting Balena in a difficult position in terms of security/reliability as long as they were active on the platform for the community to use.
For the :
NVIDIA Jetson Nano eMMC (6.5.38)
NVIDIA Jetson Nano SD-card (4.0.9+rev2)
Both were discontinued due to only being supported by Jetpack 4, which has been EOLd by Nvidia.