January 2025 monthly summary for balena-os/balena-generic centered on delivering a kernel upgrade to v6.12.31 and updating build recipes to support the new kernel. This work advances security, feature parity, and long-term maintainability for balenaOS devices by ensuring compatibility with newer kernel features and patches.

November 2024 in balena-os/meta-balena focused on reliability and security enhancements. Root filesystem by-state link reliability under software RAID was fixed by filtering lsblk to relevant partitions and accompanied by a test ensuring active and inactive links do not point to the same device, reducing disk management errors. TPM-related improvements introduced a unified generate_pcr_digests function for PCR digest computation, added NVRAM passphrase storage, and enabled TPM-based authentication for updates, with refactors to support EFI binaries. These changes were propagated across update tooling (os-helpers-tpm2, hostapp-update-hooks, balena-init-flasher-tpm, hup: signed-update), improving security posture and maintainability. Overall, the work reduces failure domains in disk management and strengthens secure update workflows while enabling easier future TPM integration.