That is still far away from just a device specific kernel (although it does cover most everything a user would care about). I recently looked into porting cyan

That is still far away from just a device specific kernel (although it does cover most everything a user would care about). I recently looked into porting cyanogenmod to my tablet (Dell Venue 7). It has an interesting scheme that seems more in line with what tomjen wants. There is an unlocked bootloader that allows you to flash the "/system" partition. Within a days worth of porting, I was able to Intel's fork of Android and successfully flash the system partition. [1] What is interesting in their setup is that the root parition (and bootloader) live in a separate part of the storage, and I did not find a way of writing to them (I think that requires a key). This still isn't creating just a device specific kernel, but the root filesystem is pretty low-level stuff that even most tinkerers wouldn't care about updating, and you can work around it (run an updated version from /system) if you want to. [1] Unfourtuantly, Intel's changes appeared to not have propigated back to cyanogenmod yet, so I abandoned trying to port it to avoid duplicating a lot of effort.