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
