Debial 13 "Trixie" Lands with RISC-V Support — But Prepares to Drop a Few Other Architectures
64-bit RISC-V gets its moment in the sun, but the clock is ticking for i386 and armel.
The maintainers of the Debian project have officially released the latest version in the long-run Linux distribution, Debian 13 "Trixie" — the first to officially support 64-bit RISC-V, but also the first to remove support for i386 as a regular architecture.
"After 2 years, 1 month, and 30 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 13 (code name 'Trixie')," the maintainers announced over the weekend. "'Trixie' will be supported for the next five years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team. This release contains over 14,100 new packages for a total count of 69,830 packages, while over 8,840 packages have been removed as 'obsolete.' 44,326 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for 'Trixie' is 403,854,660 kB (403 GB), and is made up of 1,463,291,186 lines of code."
Debian was launched by founder Ian Murdock in 1993, and is the second-oldest Linux distribution still in active development — being pipped to the post by Slackware by a matter of months. It's known for its broad hardware support, and serves as the upstream distribution to a range of other distributions including Canonical's Ubuntu Linux.
The latest release is a milestone for the project, in that it's the first to officially support devices built around 64-bit implementations of the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture. Despite this "i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture," the maintainers warn, referring to the official nomenclature for 32-bit x86 systems. "There is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU. Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to Trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware."
The removal of support for i386-native hardware comes as the project also addresses another 32-bit issue: the Epochalypse, wherein Unix-like systems using a signed 32-bit integer to track the number of seconds since the epoch of January 1 1970 will overflow - an issue now fixed on all Debian versions bar the i386 build through a switch to a more capacious 64-bit signed integer.
There's another architecture leaving the list, too: Debian 13 will be the last version to support the armel architecture — and, as with i386, there's no official installed. "Only Raspberry Pi 1, Zero, and Zero W are supported by the kernel packages," the maintainers say. "Users running armel systems can upgrade to Trixie, provided their hardware is supported by the kernel packages, or they use a third-party kernel." For future releases, the maintainers recommend installing the armhf (hard float) build or, where possible, the 64-bit arm64 build — or, as with the i386 discontinuance, "retiring the hardware."
Other new features in the build include big upgrades to the installer, including better support for speech synthesis and "initial and restricted" support for rescuing a Debian installation on a btrfs subvolume, and updated versions of various software packages in its repositories — "over 63% of all packages from the previous release," the maintainers say.
Interested parties can download live install media for Debian 13 "Trixie" from the official website now.