#Debian #armel has reached end of life with the release of #trixie and will not be included in #forky (already being removed from sid)

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

#Debian #armel has reached end of life with the release of #trixie and will not be included in #forky (already being removed from sid).

Unfortunately, that means e-waste for the affected devices, such as several older #RPi editions (unless switching to Raspian, which may or may not even work or support them for longer and is effort anyway).

armel has not been part of #LTS and #ELTS for a while, but this was not a problem as it’s a minority architecture and users could always upgrade (btw, if your armel box is still running bookworm, you’ll want to be on trixie by 2026-06-10).

I asked for it to be included in trixie LTS and ELTS, so that the old hardware can be used mostly securely until about 2035 instead of 2028, and the limiting factor for this is not will or infrastructure but funding. (While most security fixes aren’t specific to one of the architectures in question, there’s still some overhead, and armel is often slower to build and may need some more hand-holding than the newer armhf and arm64, so I believe that funding is actually needed.)

I’m just a private individual running one box with it I got as a gift, so I cannot offer much, but if you care about Debian and can offer funding, please approach @freexian (who organise LTS and offer ELTS as a separate-from-Debian offer) about this (and specifically mention armel).

If someone has connections to organisations involved in devices that cannot run armv7 hardfloat Debian or better, such as the #Raspberry Pi foundation, please ask them to contribute to #Freexian in the same way, so we can have proper Debian on these devices for seven years longer than planned.

Thanks in advance.