Anthias

Highlights ✨

A stability and maintenance release hardening the balena fleets and the
upgrade path after the 2026.05.1 HW-decode overhaul. No new user-facing
features — all fixes.

Bug Fixes 🐞

• balena x86 — frozen on boot splash — quit Plymouth before cage
  starts so the viewer actually gets DRM master. Previously Plymouth held
  DRM master on x86 (libseat: Could not make device fd drm master), every
  atomic commit was rejected, and the screen stayed on the splash while the
  logs flooded with Swapchain for output 'DP-1' failed test (#2955)
• balena Pi 4 — no display — repair the full-KMS graphics overlay and
  manage fleet config.txt as IAC (balena-host-config.json), fixing a
  malformed dtoverlay="vc4-kms-v3d" that stopped the eglfs renderer from
  starting (#2947, #2949)
• Headless / slow-HDMI boards — crash loop — the linuxfb viewer (pi2/pi3)
  now waits for /dev/fb0 instead of aborting with heap corruption when no
  display is connected at boot; it self-heals on hotplug (#2959)
• Pi 5 — CEC probe core dumps — stop the HDMI-CEC diagnostics probe from
  dumping cores (which could fill the SD card and crash-loop services) (#2957)
• Upgraded devices — viewer crash loop — chown the config directory so
  upgraded devices stop crash-looping on a PermissionError writing
  anthias.conf (#2953)
• Deterministic file ownership — pin the viewer UID/GID across all images
  so bind-mounted config/asset ownership is stable across rebuilds (#2958)
• balena Releases page — stamp the real CalVer version into balena.yml
  so releases show 2026.5.x instead of 0.0.0+revN (#2952)

Docs 📚

• Document the rpi-imager 2.0.x macOS write-error when flashing images, and
  the workaround (#2948, #2950)

Upgrade Notes 🧭

• No action required. Devices upgrading from an older build pick up the
  config-dir chown and the pinned viewer UID/GID automatically, which
  resolves the anthias.conf PermissionError crash loop on first boot of
  the new release (#2953, #2958).
• balena Pi 4 fleets have their config.txt reconciled from
  balena-host-config.json at deploy time; any hand-edited dashboard
  config vars outside that file are pruned (#2947).

What's Changed

Other Changes 🔧

• docs: rpi-imager macOS "Error writing to storage device" guidance (#2948) by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2950
• fix(balena): repair Pi 4 graphics overlay + manage fleet host config as IAC (#2947) by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2949
• fix(viewer): chown the config dir so upgraded devices don't crash-loop by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2953
• chore(deps): regenerate uv.lock to match dev-dependency pin bumps by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2956
• fix(diagnostics): stop CEC probe from dumping cores on Pi 5 by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2957
• fix(docker): pin viewer UID/GID across all images for deterministic ownership by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2958
• fix(viewer): wait for /dev/fb0 instead of crash-looping when headless by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2959
• fix(balena): quit Plymouth before cage so x86 viewer gets DRM master by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2955
• fix(balena): stamp real release version into balena.yml by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2952
• chore(release): bump to 2026.05.2 by @vpetersson in https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/pull/2960

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Screenly/Anthias/compare/v2026.05.1...v2026.05.2