May 31, 2026
Raspberry Pi 5 no longer fills its storage with core dumps, and other fixes
Fixes
- On a Raspberry Pi 5, the check that reads whether the display is on, which runs every 5 minutes, left a core dump of several megabytes each time. Enough of them could fill the storage and put Anthias services into a restart loop. Neither the check nor the "Turn display on" and "Turn display off" buttons leave core dumps now.
- The balena Releases page shows the real version of each Anthias release, such as
2026.5.2, instead of0.0.0+revN. That holds for the official fleets and for fleets you deploy to withbin/deploy_to_balena.sh.
Improvements
- Raspberry Pi 5 devices on the official balena fleet get
dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d,cma-512, the lineinstall.shhas written on a Pi 5 since Anthias 2026.05.1. The project's board notes list it as required for 4K HEVC hardware decoding. - The installation guide and a new FAQ entry cover the "Error writing to storage device" failure when flashing with Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.2 through at least 2.0.7 on macOS. Update Raspberry Pi Imager past 2.0.7, or decompress the image with
zstd -dand flash the.img. - The balena fleet guide uses
balena env setinstead ofbalena env addfor the host configuration commands.
For contributors
balena-host-config.jsondeclares theconfig.txtsettings for each official balena fleet, anddocs/balena-fleet-host-config.mdexplains each one. On every release, the "Build Balena Disk Images" workflow sets them on the fleets and removes any other host configuration variable there, including legacyRESIN_HOST_CONFIG_*ones. Fleets you run yourself aren't touched.- A new "Deploy to Balena (manual)" workflow redeploys an existing release to one fleet or all 5 without rebuilding disk images. It and the release workflow share
bin/balena_ota_deploy.sh. - The
vieweruser has a fixed UID and GID of 1000 and exists in both the server and viewer images, so it resolves to the same owner in every container that shares/data. uv.lockwas regenerated to match the dev dependency pins inpyproject.toml, which theuv sync --frozenstep in the image builds checks.