Armbian has recently released version 26.5 of its Linux distribution, offering a compact system environment for single board computers with processors based on ARM, RISC-V, and x86 architectures. This release supports various models of popular single board computers such as Raspberry Pi, Odroid, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Helios64, pine64, Nanopi, and Cubieboard, which are based on processors from Allwinner, Amlogic, Actionsemi, Freescale/NXP, Marvell, Armada, Rockchip, Radxa, and Samsung Exynos. Debian and Ubuntu package bases are used to form the assemblies, but all components are completely rebuilt using Armbian’s own assembly system with optimizations included to reduce size, increase performance, and apply additional security mechanisms.
One of the key features of this release is the mount of the /var/log partition using zram and stored in RAM in a compressed form with data flushed to the drive once a day or upon shutdown. Additionally, the /tmp partition is mounted using tmpfs. Armbian supports more than 30 variants of Linux kernel builds for different ARM and ARM64 platforms. An SDK is provided to simplify the creation of custom system images, packages, and distribution editions. The inclusion of ZSWAP for swapping, two-factor authentication for SSH login, and the box64 emulator for running programs compiled for x86 processors are notable additions to this release. Ready-made packages are offered for running custom environments based on KDE, GNOME, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3wm, Mate, Xfce, and Xmonad.
Some of the main changes in Armbian 26.5 include the added support for various Arduino boards, NanoPC-T6 LTS Plus, and other new devices. The Linux kernel has been updated to version 7.0 for platforms like sunxi, meson64, rockchip64, rpi4b, and uefi edge, and to version 7.1-rc for rockchip64 and meson64 platforms. The U-Boot loader has been updated to version 2026.04 for boards based on Rockchip chips.
Configurations with the desktop environment have been redesigned using YAML format and multi-level architecture in armbian-config. Support for user environments like KDE Plasma, KDE Neon, MATE, and i3wm has been transferred to the new configuration system. Expanded support for Xfce, MATE, i3, Xmonad, Enlightenment, and Cinnamon has been added for armhf and riscv64 architectures. New modules with configuration scripts for code-server, Dozzle, Wallos, ZFS pool