diff --git a/layers/meta-balena-fsl-arm/conf/layer.conf b/layers/meta-balena-fsl-arm/conf/layer.conf
index e8863706..12503cc2 100644
--- a/layers/meta-balena-fsl-arm/conf/layer.conf
+++ b/layers/meta-balena-fsl-arm/conf/layer.conf
@@ -46,3 +46,6 @@ FULL_OPTIMIZATION = "-Os -pipe ${DEBUG_FLAGS}"
 
 # Temporarily removed until the solidrun upstream repo adds honister support: https://github.com/SolidRun/meta-solidrun-solidsense/issues/2
 BBMASK += "meta-balena-fsl-arm/recipes-bsp/u-boot/u-boot-solidsense-imx6_%.bbappend"
+
+# this board is very low on rootfs space so we need to compress the kernel in order to save space
+KERNEL_IMAGETYPE:nitrogen8mm = "Image.gz"