Armbian Newsletter October 2026

Key points

Armbian's October 2026 newsletter covers a development cycle with support for many new boards, a coordinated bootloader refresh, mainline kernels moving to 7.3, Rockchip kernel, media and wireless work, and changes to the project's tools and infrastructure.

New boards

• RK3568 boards added: EasePi R1 and Pine64 Quartz64 Zero.
• Other boards added: ArmSoM CM7s IO board, Boardcon EM3588, Banana Pi BPI-M4, Banana Pi R3 Mini, Firefly AIBOX-K3, Radxa Rock 2A and Rock 2F, NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Altera Agilex 5 SoCDK.
• Laptop, tablet and handheld support covers the Skysi X5 laptop, the Qualcomm-based Lenovo Legion Y700 Gen 4 and Anbernic handhelds such as the RG Rotate.

Bootloader and kernel

• Many Rockchip and Allwinner platforms move to U-Boot v2026.10.
• Trusted Firmware-A is updated to lts-v2.14.11, and DDR blobs are refreshed.
• Mainline kernels advance to 7.3 on the rockchip64, meson64, sunxi and uefi targets.

Rockchip and other vendor work

• SATA on RK3588 now runs at 6 Gbps.
• RK3576 gains overlays for the Panfrost GPU driver.
• Amlogic video decoding (VDEC) receives fixes.
• Rockchip vendor kernel work is merged into a single rk35xx-vendor-next branch.
• The cycle also includes further Rockchip wireless changes.

Tools and infrastructure

• Armbian Imager adds a Settings page and profiles tied to a specific board, and its ext4 writer is more robust.
• armbian-install and armbianmonitor are refactored.
• Package repositories can be managed in a single mode with Acquire-By-Hash support.
• The CI pipeline handles failures better.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.