Home Assistant OS Release 6

Operating system version 6 includes a new daemon written by Go called the OS Agent. This gives the supervisor access to more aspects of the operating system. One such aspect is moving the data to an external disk or deleting data to start over without reinstalling. Please note, however, that the required logic in the supervisor and front end is still being developed at this point.

Under the hood, the operating system has been updated to the latest upstream Linux 5.10 kernel as well as Buildroot 02.12021. The latest buildroot version brings countless new software versions as well as bug and security fixes. Some important components that received an update were systemd 247 and the Docker Container Engine 20.10.6.

• The short name of the operating system used in the entire software stack has been renamed “haos”. From the user’s point of view, not much changes, but it does lead to new file names.
• The Home Assistant CLI is now started on tty1 instead of the login prompt. The HA-CLI banner displays IP and other device information without the need to connect a keyboard to log in.
• The default shell of the root user is now the busybox ashes. This enables scp and similar tools to be used with SSH.
• The system start is now delayed until the system time has been synchronized with an NTP server. This avoids connection problems to SSL / TLS-enabled servers when the system time is switched off. In practice, the delay should only be a few seconds. The system continues to start up after 90s if the NTP server could not be reached (e.g. if no internet connection is available).

All Raspberry Pi versions have been updated to use the Raspberry Pi team’s Linux kernel 5.10, just like the Raspberry Pi operating system. The latest Bluetooth firmware for CYW43455 (Raspberry Pi 3 B + / 4) with security fixes is now part of the Raspberry Pi images.

In Home Assistant OS 6 the board / image “Intel NUC” was renamed to “Generic x86-64”. Existing “Intel NUC” installation is automatically migrated to the “Generic x86-64” image during the update.

Even with OS 5, the “Intel NUC” image could be used for most UEFI-capable x86-64 systems. This fact is underlined by the renaming. Home Assistant OS is open to changes to add drivers to expand support for other x86-64 platforms. Please note, however, that we will not have access to all of the x86-64 hardware, so device support is given to the best of our ability.

Other changes:

• The Intel IGC network driver supports Intel network cards such as I225-LM / I225-V which are used on some newer Intel NUC devices.

• With Home Assistant OS 6 the latest version of the Barebox Bootloader 2021.05.0, which fixes the booting of hard drives larger than 2 TB.

• The ACPI kernel driver for Thinkpad devices is enabled.

The virtual disk images are now created from a sparse file as the source, resulting in smaller effective disk image sizes. Disk images are now also distributed in the more popular zip file format (with the exception of the qcow2 images, which are mainly used on Linux, they are still in the xz compression format).

By default, a serial console is now enabled for the image, which is useful for accessing the Home Assistant operating system on headless host systems.

Ralink rt27xx / rt28xx / rt30xx and Realtek 87xx / 88xx devices are now supported on boards that do not have integrated Wi-Fi / Bluetooth. This also applies to the OVA image for virtualized environments (when using the hardware passthrough functionality). Intel firmwares are now also included in the image for the OVA image, so that Intel Wi-Fi / Bluetooth devices can also be used in passthrough mode.