Re: Inquiry about armel support for Debian upgrades post-Trixie
Hello,
As others already clarified the question of whether it is supported,
allow me to suggest options.
On Fri, Sep 05, 2025 at 12:14:47PM +0000, Haddad, Serge wrote:
> Our systems in the field run on an armv5 chip (armel architecture) which we can't replace with newer boards with a different architecture.
There still are some options left. As of now, armel is still in the
Debian archive and still building packages. Packages will degrade (e.g.
stop building). This will be particularly noticeable when it comes to
atomic operations as armel tends to require -latomic in non-obvious
places. Eventually it will be removed from the main archive and you may
continue supporting it as a port.
If your target package set is small (< 300 source packages) and you are
provisioning your devices using images (i.e. not using apt/dpkg to
install updates), you may consider using Debian as a source distribution
and build everything from source (like Yocto).
As Ben indicated, armel is not supported by LTS at present. If you were
to look into commercially supported Debian armel, that would certainly
be more expensive.
It's not like running out of options, but you're right in looking into
this question now already.
Helmut
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