Updating firmware to address an upstream bug

Product support balenaOS
1

Hi all!

We are running into this bug: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1552 and would like to address it as soon as possible by pushing the new firmware. We see the following paths:

  • Manually updating the files from the firmware-repo (likely won’t work out, but we are currently trying it out on a development machine)
  • Building a new balena-os image with yocto (how do we push this onto the devices in the field?)
  • Wait for you to push an updated firmware (how long will this take?)
3

Since the bug seems to be stochastic, we rebooted the rpi4 a few times until the firmware transaction succeeded, and the machine seems stable now. We have a balena-os image with updated firmware ready, and if it fails again too frequently, we will drive to the machine and flash our image by hand. But it would be cool if at some point custom balena-os’es could be flashed remotely.

4

N.B. we ran into a number of problems with the firmware you’re currently shipping in your balena-os-images (for example screen blanking on accelerated video playback), so upgrading to Release 1.20210527: kernel: Enable Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT support · raspberrypi/firmware · GitHub might be a good idea.

6

Hello @dstkrt

Welcome to the balena Forums. I have contacted my colleagues in our Devices Team for their recommendations regarding your firmware issues.

Regards
Mark

8

Hey, thanks for providing the new firmware version and linking to the issue you encountered! I’ve opened an issue in our balena-raspberrypi repo for the devices team to look at, so now it’s on our radar.

We will let you know when a new version is released with this change!