Custom OS installation now available on AWS DeepRacer devices
AWS Don Barber
AWS just unlocked its DeepRacer toy race cars so you can install newer Linux versions instead of the old, unsupported Ubuntu they shipped with. It's a rare right-to-tinker move that keeps years-old hardware from becoming e-waste.
Based on reporting by AWS, Don Barber — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
AWS DeepRacer, the palm-sized autonomous race car AWS sells to teach reinforcement learning, shipped for years locked to Ubuntu 16.04 or 20.04. Both versions are long dead, unsupported, and increasingly useless for anyone trying to run current software stacks. Rather than let the fleet quietly rot, AWS just released a developer bootloader, built on the open-source shim project, that lets owners boot whatever OS they want.
The mechanism is straightforward once you see it. The stock firmware only trusts AWS-signed operating systems. The new shim adds a second door: if it finds developer certificates sitting in a specific EFI folder on the boot partition, it'll verify and boot a custom kernel signed with keys you control yourself, using ordinary tools like OpenSSL and sbsign. AWS didn't skip the security theater, either — the device blinks 'DEVELOPER MODE' in Morse code on its onboard lights and throws up an HDMI warning during a roughly 21-second boot delay, so nobody mistakes a modded car for a stock one. Revert it and you're back to factory settings; nothing here is permanent.
The DeepRacer community didn't wait around. The group behind deepracing.io already built a full replacement distribution on Ubuntu 24.04 and ROS2 Jazzy, complete with a Cloudscape-based UI, and stripped out extras like the X Window System to keep things fast on track. It installs almost exactly like the original AWS image, which matters for a hobbyist crowd that doesn't necessarily want to hand-roll GRUB configs and certificate chains from scratch.
AWS frames this as pairing nicely with the self-managed DeepRacer cloud environment it released back in January, giving developers full control on both ends — the training pipeline and the physical car. That's a fair pitch, but the more interesting story is simpler: a company selling niche ML hardware just admitted that locking devices to dead operating systems was a dead end, and handed the fix to the community instead of quietly discontinuing support.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I'll take this over the usual planned-obsolescence playbook any day — AWS could've just let these cars die on unsupported Ubuntu and pushed a new SKU, but instead it opened the boot chain and let the community do the heavy lifting. That's the right instinct for education hardware, which tends to sit in classrooms and garages for a decade after the vendor stops caring. More companies selling dev kits should copy this exact move instead of treating end-of-support as a sales opportunity.
Read more about this at: AWS
Related stories
Daybreak models are now available on AWS
OpenAI · 1 month ago ·
31