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Armbian 26.8.3

Released 23 August 2026

This quarter’s work centers on three dominant themes: broad board and platform enablement across Rockchip, Allwinner, TI, and Qualcomm SoCs; a large-scale build and CI infrastructure migration to a dedicated automation repository and a Debian Trixie host; and a rewritten installer, a new Imager release, and UEFI ISO delivery for cloud and virtual-media deployment.

Kernel and firmware stacks advanced across every major family. Mainline tracked through 7.1 stable and 7.2-rc series, with Rockchip, Meson64, Sunxi, BCM2711, mvebu64, and i.MX6 families rebased onto current branches; U-Boot was bumped to v2026.07 across dozens of boards, and Rockchip vendor blobs (rkbin) were refreshed for RK3506, RK3528, RK3568, RK3576, and RV1106. New board additions include the Anbernic RG DS and RG Vita Pro, Luckfox Nova, LubanCat 5IO, Milk-V DuoS, Avnet MaaXBoard 8ULP, SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX, Radxa Dragon Q6A/Q8B, Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro, EASY EAI Nano, NanoPi NEO3 Plus, Walnut Pi, and Seeed reComputer RK3576/RK3588, several of which were subsequently promoted to Supported. Out-of-tree wireless drivers (rtl8852bs, rtl8189es/fs, rtl8192eu, uwe5622) received substantial warning cleanups and kernel-7.2 compatibility work.

Build automation was consolidated into the new armbian/ci repository, taking over cronjobs, nightly, community, and stable release tracks from armbian/os, with introduction of a watchdog for stalled runs, weekly Monday stable builds, and per-runner proxy, cache, and CPU-thread mapping derived from NetBox. The official build host and default Docker image were migrated to Debian Trixie, with GCC 14/15 fallout addressed across U-Boot, i.MX8ULP libbpf, Realtek RTD1619B, and multiple Odroid targets; native riscv64 Docker images and a base-files-only workflow were added. Rockchip vendor U-Boot rebuilds, docker image tagging, and artifact hashing were hardened for parallel and cache-consistent execution.

User-facing tooling saw armbian-install redesigned as a tested armbian-config module with SPI/MTD boot targets, standalone bootloader flashing, UEFI dual-boot diagnostics, and eMMC/NVMe split installs. Armbian Imager 2.0 shipped with UFS flashing over EDL for Qualcomm boards, QDL board-registry integration, and hardened device enumeration on Windows and Linux. A new image-output-iso extension produces bootable live ISOs from UEFI images for cloud and IPMI virtual-CD workflows, with UEFI current, edge, and Debian Trixie cloud targets now published as ISO artifacts alongside standard image formats.

Board status changes

All changes

782 merged pull requests in this release

Boards

Kernel and U-Boot

Desktop

Build framework and CI

Tooling

Other