Debian stops supporting 32bit version of mips

The Debian Project will no longer support the 32bit version of mips, also known as mipsel, with the next release of its Debian operating system. Version 12, ‘Bookworm’, is the last stable release with mipsel support.

The reason mipsel will no longer be supported is due to several issues, writes the team behind the operating system. It didn’t work out that way ‘year 2038’ software problem to solve and there was a memory limit of 2GB in the user space. Another reason mentioned is that the development team lacks the manpower to maintain the processor architecture.

Mipsel was already removed from the unstable, experimental version of Debian on Saturday. In the upcoming stable release of the distro, called ‘Trixie’, the architecture will also no longer be supported. That version is not expected to be released for another two years. The 32bit version of mips was one of the oldest architectures still supported by the OS; only the 38-year-old i386 has been around a little longer. The 64bit version, mips64el, will receive an official port with Debian version 13. In addition, Trixie will likely include support for RISC-V devices.

Debian has been around for almost 30 years now. Ian Murdock announced on August 16, 1993 that his Debian Linux Release was near, with Debian 0.01 released on September 15 that same year. The first stable release followed in 1996. The Linux-based operating system has now become very popular. Debian is the basis for several other popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.

Desktop from Debian 12