July 13, 2026
Raspberry Pi 2 and 32-bit Pi 3 players stop crashing to a blank screen
If your Raspberry Pi 2 or Raspberry Pi 3 player sat on a blank screen and played nothing, or went blank now and then, upgrading to Anthias 2026.07.2 fixes it. It affects the 32-bit images only.
On a Raspberry Pi 2, or a Raspberry Pi 3 running the 32-bit image (pi2 and pi3), the viewer could crash as it started, restart, and crash again. On some players that happened on every start, so the screen stayed blank and nothing played. On others it happened now and then, and the viewer came back on the next try.
From Anthias 2026.07.2 the viewer runs steadily on these boards. In the project's testing on a Pi 2 and a 32-bit Pi 3, it showed web pages, images and video for hours without a single crash.
The 64-bit images, including the 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 image (pi3-64), build their web view a different way and don't need this fix.
After the upgrade, System Info still shows 2026.07.1, because this release reports the previous version number.
For contributors
The pi2 and pi3 images don't compile Qt. The image builder downloads a prebuilt Qt 5.15.19 toolchain, QtWebEngine included, from a WebView-v* GitHub release and builds the AnthiasViewer app against it. At this tag, qt5_toolchain_url in tools/image_builder/utils.py points at WebView-v2026.07.1, whose tarballs carry the fix, so a viewer image you build from 2026.07.2 gets it with no other change.
The crash came from the compiler. Debian's armhf gcc turns some struct copies into 64-bit NEON stores that require 8-byte alignment, and QtWebEngine sometimes passes them memory aligned to only 4 bytes. The Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A53 fault on that, and the kernel can't fix up a NEON access, so the viewer dies with Unhandled fault: alignment exception (0x801) in dmesg. src/anthias_webview/build_qt5.sh now builds QtWebEngine's Chromium with arm_use_neon=false and wraps the armhf gcc and g++ with -mno-unaligned-access, so the toolchain no longer contains those stores. The script also runs on Debian Trixie's Python 3.13 now, with shims for the imp, pipes and cgi modules that Chromium 87's build scripts still import.