The ecological improvement of the LoongArch architecture of Loongson has been relatively rapid recently. The software and hardware such as open source network boot firmware iPXE, QQ Linux version, and Moore threads have officially announced that they support LoongArch architecture.
As for Debian, the RISC-V Chinese community official Weibo previously announced that the Debian community has officially accepted riscv64 as the official support architecture, and currently, Debian is beginning to support the Loongson LoongArch architecture, and DebianPorts has now added support for the Loongson LoongArch architecture, which means All Debian Ports archive mirrors and their infrastructure contain the LoongArch architecture.
▲ Image source buildd.debian.org
LoongArch is now the latest target of the Debian Ports archive mirrors. The initial Debian LoongArch bootstrap contains about 200 packages, and the developers are currently working on the associated self-hosted software. After a certain stage of work, Debian plans to start running Debian package builds on Loongson-hosted LoongArch CPU hardware.
▲ Picture source Debian Ports
Debian is one of the oldest GNU/Linux distributions and the basis for many other Linux-based operating systems, including Ubuntu, Kali, MX, and Raspberry Pi OS, among others. This operating system focuses on stability and does not pursue fancy new features, so the release of new versions often takes a long time.
The Linux distribution Debian 12.1 was released in late July this year. This version mainly fixes multiple security issues such as system user creation. It is still essentially a “minor repair” of Debian 12, but the Linux kernel has been upgraded from version 5.10 to version 6.1 LTS (with updated drivers, support for new hardware, and long-term support until at least December 2026).
