HassOS 3 released! Raspberry Pi 4 support December 17, 2019 three minutes reading time

A bit behind the original timeline, but we happy to announce, we’ve released version 3 of Hass.io Operating System: HassOS. Just in time for Christmas!

TL;DR; A quick summary of the changes:

Official RPi4 support

Linux LT 4.19

Buildroot LT 2019

USB-boot capabilities for the RPi3

SMS integrations with USB/GSM modem

Qemu Agent support

Optimized kernel for virtual appliances

Improved automatic disk expansion

Initial foundation for offloading the data partition

Raspberry Pi

We now officially support the Raspberry Pi 4 on this stable version of HassOS! The Raspberry Pi 4 is a great and powerful device to get you started on Hass.io and Home Assistant.

@rbray89 worked hard on this release to add the very often requested USB boot support! Please note, this is currently limited to RPi3 devices. Carefully read how the USB boot works and be aware of the limited supported hardware.

Hypervisors / Running HassOS on a Virtual Machine

The HassOS image for virtual appliances did get some useful updates as well. We have optimized the Linux kernel to support more virtual hardware.

We have now included the QEMU Agent in HassOS. So if you are running on a Hypervisor that is QEMU based (e.g., Proxmox or Libvirt), you now have a lot more information in your Hypervisor control panel, proper shutdown support and improved support for backing up/snapshotting your virtual machine.

Finally, the automated disk expansion got some updates. So if you need more disk space in your virtual appliance, add it in your Hypervisor and HassOS automatically pick it up at the next boot.

We want to emphasize that running Hass.io as a virtual machine is the only supported method to run Hass.io on a virtualized system. We’ve lately seen some funky tutorials on how to run Hass.io inside a container like Docker or LXC, which we DO NOT recommend, you will end up having issues.

How to update to HassOS 3

If you are already running HassOS, you have the full flavor of Hass.io, and thus, all the comfort it has to offer, making this upgrade a breeze!

To update via the user interface, go to the Home Assistant frontend, click on Hass.io in the sidebar to go into the Hass.io panel. Next, click on the System tab and press the UPDATE button in the “Host system” panel. In case the update isn’t showing up yet, push the RELOAD button on the “Hass.io supervisor” box first, which makes your system look for updates instantly.

Another option is to use our powerful CLI, that is shipped with the SSH add-on. Run the following command to trigger the upgrade: hassio os update --version 3.7 .

Update 2019-12-18

After some confusion about the statement of supporting virtual environments and running Hass.io on top of a custom Linux; so let’s clarify it.

The supported ways to run Hass.io are documented here: https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/

This also includes running Hass.io on Linux using the Generic Linux installer, which is a supported method.

Hass.io runs partly on your local machine, but for most parts inside multiple containers. All installation types we list, respect this.

If you run VMWare, ProxMox or other virtualization environments, you can use the HassOS OVA/VMDK to run a virtual machine with. Or, if you like to use a Ubuntu VM, that will work with the supported generic Linux installer.

We DO NOT support any kind of LXC hacks like listed here: https://github.com/whiskerz007/proxmox_hassio_lxc. These setups try to put everything inside a single container, which will cause you issues. Hass.io is not designed to run fully inside a containerized system, like LXC.

We hope this clarifies our earlier statement.