We would not even need the mainline kernel to decouple images from particular hardware. In postmarketOS we only have a hand full of device specific packages (id

We would not even need the mainline kernel to decouple images from particular hardware. In postmarketOS we only have a hand full of device specific packages (ideally only one per device), and one of them is the downstream kernel for non-mainlined devices. All other binary packages can be shared between all devices of the same CPU architecture (in Alpine terms usually "armhf" or "aarch64" for mobile phones and tablets). Just like Linux distributions do it. The big benefit of the mainline kernel is, that it is the only way to get all the (security) fixes. Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux kernel who maintains the stable releases) wrote in Februrary: > As proof of this, I demoed at the Kernel Recipes talk referenced above how trivial it was to crash all of the latest flagship Android phones on the market with a tiny userspace program. The fix for this issue was released 6 months prior in the LTS kernel that the devices were based on, however none of the devices had upgraded or fixed their kernels for this problem. As of this writing (5 months later) only two devices have fixed their kernel and are now not vulnerable to that specific bug. Source: http://kroah.com/log/blog/2018/02/05/linux-kernel-release-model/ http://kroah.com/log/blog/2018/02/05/linux-kernel-release-mo...