Anthias 2026.06.0: Raspberry Pi 4 devices on balena no longer reboot in a loop

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If your Raspberry Pi 4 gets Anthias from the official balena fleet and kept restarting after 2026.05.2 came out, it's fixed and you don't need to do anything. Every Pi 4 on that fleet was caught in the loop and couldn't take the release.

The fleet is screenly_ose/anthias-pi4. Its setting was corrected by hand as soon as it was found, which stopped the loop before this release, and Anthias 2026.06.0 puts the same fix into the release itself, so the next release doesn't bring the loop back.

The fleet's boot settings come from balena-host-config.json in the repository, which the release workflow started applying in 2026.05.2. For the Pi 4 it set dtparam to i2c_arm=on,spi=on,audio=on, and balena never settled on that comma-joined value, so the device kept rewriting its boot configuration and rebooting. Anthias 2026.06.0 sets it to audio=on, the same line the Anthias installer writes on Raspberry Pi OS. Onboard audio keeps working. The fleet configuration no longer turns on the I2C and SPI buses. Anthias doesn't use them, and the installer on Raspberry Pi OS never turned them on.

If you run your own Pi 4 fleet and set BALENA_HOST_CONFIG_dtparam, give it a single value.

Anthias 2026.06.0: A Raspberry Pi 4 with no screen attached waits for one, and other improvements

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fixes

A Raspberry Pi 4 that starts with no display attached waits for one instead of crash-looping with no screens available. When a screen is connected or powered on, the viewer starts by itself. This is the Pi 4 counterpart of the wait that Pi 2 and Pi 3 got in 2026.05.2.

For contributors

bin/balena_fleet_maintenance.py moves devices on the 5 official screenly_ose/anthias-* balena fleets forward a batch at a time. For each device it removes the pin to a release, so the device follows the fleet's latest stable release, and starts an update to the latest balenaOS. It does a dry run unless you pass --apply, skips offline devices, takes 1% of the remaining devices per run unless you set --percent or --count, records finished devices in .balena-maint-state.tsv so the next run skips them, and moves on when a device fails.

Anthias 2026.06.0 | Screenly

Anthias 2026.06.0: Raspberry Pi 4 devices on balena no longer reboot in a loop

Anthias 2026.06.0: A Raspberry Pi 4 with no screen attached waits for one, and other improvements

Fixes

For contributors