28 September 2023 / Last updated: 28 Sep 2023
Raspberry Pi 5 available now on balenaOS
Today Raspberry Pi Ltd. announced the new Raspberry Pi 5, and we are pleased to announce the release of balenaOS for this new board! With the struggles brought on by supply chain issues for the past few years, many assumed no new iterations of the Pi would be introduced until at least 2024, so we are thrilled by this great news!
Raspberry Pi 5 image courtesy of Raspberry Pi Ltd.
Raspberry Pi 5 now supported by balenaCloud
We’ve been very grateful to have early access to this board, not only so we could add balenaOS support, but also to think about all the new possibilities…
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Obviously the improved performance was one of our first “wow” moments - a 250% performance boost over the Raspberry Pi 4 is quite impressive!
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Our digital signage customers will be thrilled with the new support for H.265 4Kp60 decoding capability.
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What interesting hats and third party accessories will be enabled by that beautiful new PCIe connector??
If you have been blessed with Raspberry Pi 5 pre-release hardware, you can boot balenaOS using the
raspberrypi-5 device type right now on balenaCloud. Although we’ve been hard at work on this initial release, we still need to add the Raspberry Pi 5 to our automated testing and release process so that you always get the latest version of balenaOS with your hardware. Stay tuned for that announcement, as well as how to make the most of the board on balenaCloud, migrate from older devices, and scale your fleets as quickly as possible! 
Balena and Raspberry Pi
Meanwhile, balena has been a supporter of the Raspberry Pi since our early days. If you’re unfamiliar with how the Raspberry Pi has enabled balena’s history, here’s a bit of a fun (and often unknown) timeline:
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2013 - Balena (then called Resin.io) became the first company to port Docker to ARM devices and was primarily tested on the Raspberry Pi 1. 💪
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2015 - A former balenista created the meta-raspberrypi layer with the Yocto community, which balena continues to use, contribute to, and support financially (if you don’t know, the Yocto Project enables the build of customized Linux distributions for embedded devices - including balenaOS!).
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2018 - Our first multi-container implementation for ARM was announced initially for the Raspberry Pi 3.
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2022 - The largest Raspberry Pi enabled fleet on balenaCloud (that we can tell you about!) was publicly shared.
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2023 - We were given early access to the Raspberry Pi 5 hardware so we could provide a compatible balenaOS release on announcement day - we also intend to upstream Raspberry Pi 5 support to meta-raspberrypi for other Yocto users!
It’s been a really fun journey so far and we’re excited about what this new hardware will enable for our customers. Stay tuned to our blog posts and we’ll keep you updated as we bring full balena support to all of the Raspberry Pi 5’s great features!
What are your Pi 5 plans?
Are you thinking of building a fleet with Raspberry Pi 5s? Are you planning to migrate any of your older Raspberry Pis in the field? Let us know in the comments, social media, or in our Forum what problems you plan to solve using the Raspberry Pi 5 on balenaCloud and how we can help!
by Alan Boris and Kenna