Beta images is for us getting valuable feedback from users. We're currently only interested in legacy builds, vanilla will follow (there not even Wi-Fi is working now). In case you want to use 4.9 in a reasonable way you would have to use our build system. But I switched the kernel repo for my tests (see here for details) and also my image is made not with ext4 but a fixed size btrfs rootfs (4 GB in size). So any feedback on this is useless. But in case you want to give it a try: https://transfer.sh/dck4H/armbian-5.24-orangepizero-ubuntu-xenial-4.9.0.7z
Known problem: cpufreq scaling is working, throttling not. Using a heatsink is mandatory!