The Linux Device Tree infrastructure was created as a hardware description for hardware that cannot describe itself at runtime, which is mostly ARM SoCs. Howeve

The Linux Device Tree infrastructure was created as a hardware description for hardware that cannot describe itself at runtime, which is mostly ARM SoCs. However that only works when hardware drivers are wired up to the device tree infrastrucure instead of being fully hardcoded. Given the usual bare minimum investment in software by most embedded hardware vendors, many/most drivers probably aren't. Given a set of hardware with the same instruction set and drivers with full device tree support, one can now create one kernel for the whole set.