> Why? That sounds dumb. Good, you understand the situation perfectly. > And (assuming you're correct), how does Armbian deal with that / get around it? You'

> Why? That sounds dumb. Good, you understand the situation perfectly. > And (assuming you're correct), how does Armbian deal with that / get around it? You'll notice that if you try to download it from https://www.armbian.com/download/ https://www.armbian.com/download/ , nearly every board has a different download image; this is because every one of those images embeds its own boot chain. There are efforts (in some projects, I'm not aware of armbian doing this) to build some amount of early bootloader per-board (often uboot), and just make the install steps something like "install this per-board thing, then install the real OS using a standard image" but that's less common and doesn't work super well when that initial bootloader has to go on the same storage device as the main OS.