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Armbian 26.8.3

Released 23 August 2026

This cycle is defined by broad platform modernization, a restructured build and CI pipeline, and substantial user-facing tooling improvements across the installer, imager, and image output formats.

Kernel and firmware baselines advanced across the tree, with mainline moving to 7.1 stable and 7.2-rc, and edge branches bumped on rockchip64, meson64, mvebu64, sunxi, and bcm2711. U-Boot was refreshed to v2026.04/07 on dozens of boards, including Rockchip RK35xx, Amlogic, i.MX6, mvebu Espressobin, and various SBCs. New board support spans Rockchip (Anbernic RG DS and RG Vita Pro, Luckfox Nova, LubanCat 5IO, KICKPI K3B, reComputer RK3576/RK3588, EASY EAI Nano, Graperain G3568 v2, Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro), Allwinner (Sovol Zero/SV08, Walnut Pi, Cubie A7Z, Orange Pi 4 Pro and Zero 3W, Tanix TX6S), SpacemiT (K3 Pico-ITX, Milk-V DuoS), NXP (Avnet MaaXBoard 8ULP), Qualcomm (Radxa Dragon Q6A/Q8B with UFS provisioning), and TI (BeagleBadge, TMDS64EVM). Wireless drivers received extensive cleanup, with rtl8852bs, rtl8189es, rtl8192eu, and uwe5622 rebased into dedicated Armbian forks with 7.1/7.2 compatibility and thousands of compiler warnings eliminated.

The build and CI infrastructure underwent a structural migration from armbian/os to armbian/ci, introducing self-hosted runner registration via NetBox, per-runner proxy and cache export, watchdog-based auto-retry for stalled jobs, and a weekly stable build cadence. The default build host and Docker base image moved to Debian Trixie, with native riscv64 image generation and GCC 13 cross toolchains for K3 R5 SPL. Kernel patch handling gained parallel rewriting, stricter From-header hygiene, and pinned source SHAs via git_sources.json.

User-facing changes center on a redesigned armbian-install delivered as a tested armbian-config module, with SPI/MTD boot targeting, split eMMC/NVMe flows, standalone bootloader flash, and clearer diagnostics for UEFI and dual-boot scenarios. Armbian Imager 2.0 ships with QDL and UFS flashing for Qualcomm targets, board registry from the API, 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 deployment, and the download and redirector infrastructure was extended to carry ISO assets alongside compressed raw images.

Board status changes

All changes

787 merged pull requests in this release

Boards

Kernel and U-Boot

Desktop

Build framework and CI

Tooling

Other