Can You Run Braiins OS+, VNish or LuxOS on a Canaan Avalon?

Short answer: if you own an Avalon Nano 3, Nano 3S, Mini 3 or Avalon Q, the aftermarket firmwares you know from the Antminer world — Braiins OS+, VNish, LuxOS, ePIC and Hiveon — will not run on your machine. None of them lists Canaan’s K230 home line among its supported models. That is not an oversight on our part; it is what each vendor publishes on its own compatibility page. But “no aftermarket firmware” is not the same as “no firmware freedom.” Canaan open-sources the firmware for these miners, a small community has already built custom images for them, and D-Central is building an open-source option of its own. Here is the honest, verifiable map.

Can You Run Braiins OS+, VNish or LuxOS on a Canaan Avalon?

For the home line — Nano 3, Nano 3S, Mini 3, Avalon Q — the answer is no. The five best-known ASIC firmware projects were built around Bitmain’s control boards (and, for a couple of them, MicroBT’s). Their published support lists tell the story:

Firmware	Who it targets	Any Canaan Avalon support?
Braiins OS+	Bitmain Antminer only	No. Braiins states plainly that Whatsminer and Canaan Avalon “use different control board architectures and are not compatible.”
VNish	Bitmain Antminer (S9–S21, plus L7/L9)	No Avalon model on VNish’s own supported list.
LuxOS	Bitmain Antminer (S9, S19 and S21 generations)	No. Antminer-only, tied to the Luxor pool ecosystem.
ePIC	ePIC hardware and select Antminer models	No Avalon model on its supported list.
Hiveon	Antminer, Whatsminer, and some legacy Avalon	Partial — but only the older industrial rigs (see below). Not the Nano/Mini/Q home line.

The one nuance worth stating precisely, because it is where a lot of internet copy gets it wrong: Hiveon does support some Canaan hardware — its published model list covers the older Raspberry-Pi- and K210-era industrial units (AvalonMiner 841 and 851, the A10xx line, the A11xx Pro range, and the A1246). What Hiveon’s list does not include is a single Nano, Mini or Avalon Q. So if you have run into the blanket claim that “no third-party firmware supports any Avalon,” treat it as folklore: it is right about the home miners and wrong about the industrial back-catalogue. For the machines this page is about — the K230 home line — the aftermarket really is empty.

Why Did the Aftermarket Skip Canaan’s Home Miners?

Two reasons, and neither is an accident.

Different silicon. Every Avalon home miner runs on Canaan’s own Kendryte K230 — a RISC-V dual-core system-on-chip that boots Linux on one core and an RTOS on the other, with no FPGA in the signal path. The entire third-party firmware industry grew up on Bitmain’s ARM/Xilinx-Zynq control boards. Porting a tuning firmware to RISC-V is not a recompile; it means a new toolchain and a from-scratch ASIC driver, with no shared reference implementation to lean on. That is a large amount of engineering for a device class that only recently existed.

Canaan already opened the door. The aftermarket-firmware business was, in large part, a response to Bitmain shipping locked, closed binaries — the “unlock the performance the vendor hid” pitch had real room to operate. Canaan left far less of that gap. It is the most open of the big three manufacturers: it publishes the firmware source for the K230 home line (the Avalon_Nano3s and Avalon_mm repositories), maintains a public CGMiner fork with its ASIC drivers, and ships a first-party privileged-API tuning path. When the source is already on GitHub and the vendor hands you a tuning interface, the classic third-party value proposition has less to prove. Credit where it is due: on openness, Canaan set a bar that Bitmain and MicroBT have not.

Is There Any Custom Firmware for the Avalon Nano 3, Nano 3S or Mini 3?

Yes — a small, real, community-built scene has formed around the K230 home line. We describe it here as neutral fact so you can find it and judge it for yourself. None of it is a D-Central procedure, and every item below voids your manufacturer warranty and can permanently damage or brick a miner if done wrong. Treat these as experiments on hardware you are willing to lose, not as maintenance.

The orca.pet Nano 3 jailbreak

The best-documented entry point is a community jailbreak for the Avalon Nano 3, published by Marcos Del Sol Vives at orca.pet/nanojb. In plain terms: it patches the firmware’s signature check so the miner will accept an unsigned update image, then adds a Dropbear SSH server for shell access and a tweak that stops logging from wearing out the flash. It is delivered through the miner’s own built-in SWUpdate web interface (the same port-9090 uploader the stock firmware uses). The original foothold was a command-injection flaw in the early firmware’s timezone-setting page — a genuine security bug that Canaan closed in a later release. That history is the reason we say it out loud: the jailbreak deliberately turns off signature verification, which is a security downgrade as well as a warranty-voider. We are pointing at what exists and what it does; we are not walking you through it. If you want the procedure, it lives on orca’s page, at your own risk.

Kratos (Avalon Mini 3)

For the Avalon Mini 3, the retailer Mineshop publishes a free custom firmware called Kratos (hosted at SoloBlocks.io). It advertises per-chip frequency tuning, a range of overclock presets from eco to maximum, and dynamic fan curves — the kind of control the stock firmware keeps behind limits. It is distributed as a flashable image applied with Canaan’s own K230 recovery tool on Windows. As with any overclocking firmware, the caveats are the whole story: it voids warranty, and pushing frequency and voltage past factory settings adds heat and can shorten the life of the hardware. Mineshop documents the install on its own site; confirm the current version and download there before you touch a miner. (Mineshop also ships a separate free monitoring app, confusingly also branded Kratos, that simply reads stats from Avalon and other miners — that one is a dashboard, not firmware, and changes nothing on the device.)

Independent reverse engineering: TNA-OS

The deepest work so far came in June 2026, when an independent researcher known as Nikos (Molon Labe Holdings) published what is, to date, the first public reverse engineering of Canaan’s A3197S ASIC — the chip inside the Nano 3S — tracing the full host-to-chip mining protocol that Canaan had never documented. The accompanying firmware branch, TNA-OS, drives the chips directly, independent of any vendor software, with any-pool support, user-adjustable frequency and voltage, and Stratum V2. It is early, independent, single-source research rather than a productised release, and it carries the same warranty and risk caveats as anything on this page — but it is exactly the kind of open, verifiable work that makes a locked platform approachable. It deserves credit as a piece of the commons.

The community overclocking scene

Beyond those projects, there is a growing set of community guides — forum threads and video walkthroughs — for tuning the Nano 3S’s frequency and voltage on top of Canaan’s open-source firmware. We mention the category so you know it exists; we do not endorse a specific recipe. The same rule applies: overclocking a home miner trades warranty and hardware margin for a few percent of hashrate, and the right amount of homework happens before you flash anything, not after.

Where Does DCENT_OS Fit?

D-Central is building DCENT_OS for Canaan — an open-source, GPL-3.0 firmware effort aimed at the K230 home line. We want to be exact about its status, because “open-source” is a promise you can verify and we would rather you hold us to it: it is in active development, not a finished product. There is no public image and no install path today, and we make no claim that it mines your Avalon yet. What we can say is that it is the only fully-open (GPL-3.0) firmware project targeting this hardware, and that the groundwork — the flash tooling and a clean-room driver effort — is real and progressing. This is the “don’t trust, verify” principle applied to your own miner: an open firmware you could one day read, build and audit, rather than take on faith. If you want to follow the work or help accelerate it, our roadmap page has the honest, evidence-by-evidence status and the ways to get involved. What you will never get from us is a “flash this today” button before the software has earned it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I install Braiins OS+ on an Avalon Nano 3S?

No. Braiins OS+ supports Bitmain Antminer hardware only. Braiins itself notes that Canaan Avalon miners use a different control-board architecture and are not compatible. No Avalon model appears on the Braiins, VNish, LuxOS or ePIC supported lists.

Does any third-party firmware support the Avalon Nano 3, Mini 3 or Avalon Q?

Not from the major aftermarket vendors. What exists instead is a community scene: the orca.pet jailbreak for the Nano 3, the free Kratos firmware for the Mini 3 from Mineshop, and independent reverse-engineering work (TNA-OS) on the Nano 3S. All of it voids warranty and carries real risk, and none of it is a D-Central procedure.

Does Hiveon work on AvalonMiners?

Only on the older industrial models. Hiveon’s supported-model list includes legacy Avalon rigs — the 841 and 851, the A10xx line, the A11xx Pro range and the A1246 — but it does not include the Nano, Mini or Avalon Q home miners. For the home line, there is no aftermarket firmware option.

Will overclocking or jailbreaking my Avalon void the warranty?

Yes. Custom firmware, jailbreaks and privileged-API tuning all void the manufacturer warranty, and Canaan says so directly about its own privileged tools. Overclocking also adds heat and electrical stress that can shorten hardware life or brick a unit outright. If you value the warranty and the machine, tune within the stock firmware’s limits and keep power stable through any update.

Is DCENT_OS available for my Avalon today?

No. DCENT_OS for Canaan is in active development. There is no public image and no install path yet, and we make no claim that it mines Avalon hardware. It is an open-source (GPL-3.0) alternative being built in the open — you can follow its progress and contribute, but you cannot flash it today.

The Safer Path: Stock Firmware, Done Right

For almost every owner, the right move is not custom firmware at all — it is keeping the official firmware current, because Canaan’s updates fix real bugs (including the security flaw the Nano jailbreak first exploited, and a stability issue on early builds). If you are here to update rather than to modify, our step-by-step AvalonMiner firmware upgrade guide covers the supported update paths with the discipline that matters most: match the firmware to the exact model, keep power stable through the entire write, and verify the result before you walk away. D-Central sells, updates and repairs this hardware from our workshop in Montreal — if a firmware job goes sideways, we are the shop that can bring the miner back.