New firmware received from Avalon via email.
Upgrade was successful using standard web-based OpenWRT firmware upgrade procedure.
New image appears to be based on cgminer 2.10.5, and the fans are running at a much higher speed (and noise level) than the previous image. Restarted and was back to mining within minutes... let's see how this impacts stability.
I'm assuming that one can manually alter the fan profile in cgminer's config file. Have you tried this already?