Mender 2.2 beta: Yocto warrior and Raspberry Pi 4

We are excited to release Mender 2.2 beta!

Mender 2.2 adds new hardware and OS support and contains performance and stability improvements.

The key features of Mender 2.2 beta are covered below, and you can see the detailed items in the Mender 2.2.0 beta release notes.

Yocto Project warrior (2.7) support

With Mender 2.2, meta-mender has a new warrior branch, to fully support the warrior (2.7) release of the Yocto Project!

Remember you can always check the support matrix of the Yocto Project in the compatibility section of the documentation.

Known issue upgrading from thud to warrior

Please note that there is a known issue with using Mender to upgrade devices running thud to warrior. How to achieve this will be documented for the final release, and you can follow the discussion if you plan to test this with the beta.

Raspberry Pi 4 integration for Yocto

The Raspberry Pi family of boards continue to be popular boards to test and run Mender on.

Mender Hub now provides an integration for the Raspberry Pi 4 on Yocto. If you have obtained one, test full system updates on it with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with the Yocto Project integration!

Performance improvements for the Mender server

Given the growing scalability needs, the Mender server and UI has received several performance enhancements to more efficiently support a larger number of devices.

These improvements include more efficient API access in the UI and database index improvements. This will make the Mender server much more responsive at higher scale.

Commercial features are coming

Commercial editions of Mender will soon get new value-add features! These include:

• Delta updates: Save up to 70-90% bandwidth and make updates much faster
• Phased rollout: Gradually roll out an update across the devices
• Schedule deployments: Set the start time of a deployment to when the devices are not in use, such as during the night
• Two factor authentication: Reduce risk of account compromise on the Mender server
• Multi tenancy: Isolate different environments, such as test and production, in an efficient way
• Device filtering: Easily find devices by any inventory attribute

Reach out to contact@mender.io to try a beta of the new commercial features for free.

Try Mender 2.2 beta

The documentation has a new 2.2 section that includes all the necessary resources. To test the new features, start with these pages:

• Install a Mender 2.2 beta demo server

• Test system updates on the Raspberry Pi 4

• Install the Mender client Debian package

• Use community-supported Update Modules

Support for your board

If you are getting started with OTA updates, or do not have time to integrate the Mender client with your board for robust A/B system updates, there are several resources available to you!

The Board Integrations category in Mender Hub is a community site to contribute, reuse and maintain Mender board integrations.

We are also happy to help with consulting services to enable verified Mender support for your board!

Share your feedback

We appreciate your general feedback on Mender, be it positive or need for improvement, in the Mender Hub General Discussions forum. Your continued feedback ensures Mender will meet your needs even better in the future!

If you believe you have encountered a bug, please submit your report at the Mender JIRA issue tracker.

We hope you enjoy the new features and are looking forward to hearing from you!