It's basically the same in the x86 world : your bios is customised to the board The sad part is that on ARM the kernel is usually also custom compiled for the

It's basically the same in the x86 world : your bios is customised to the board The sad part is that on ARM the kernel is usually also custom compiled for the board. So what happens is that Armbian ship a different image for each board. If you go and look in https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/arch/arm you see a zillion "mach-xxx" directories for different SoC architectures, even if they all use Arm. Device-tree is a partial solution, but no-one seems to have an incentive to finish the job and let a single image run on any (sufficiently recent) arm board. It's difficult for the community to fix because most people have only their own board. Someone would need to pay for a CI rig with every board, and some kernel devs to do the work of building a single kernel to run across everything. (I think that's originally what Linaro was for - not sure why they didn't finish the job)