Support for SPARC has been removed from Debian

Jul 27, 2015 05:27 GMT  ·  By

On July 27, the Debian Project, through Joerg Jaspert, announced the effective removal of support for the SPARC hardware architecture from the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.

Following a previous email, where Joerg Jaspert had reported the fact that the SPARC was no longer an active hardware architecture in both the current stable release of Debian, Jessie, and the upcoming Stretch branch, he just removed it from the main archive.

Therefore, support for the SPARC architecture was purged from the unstable, experimental, and jessie-updates channels of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, starting today, July 27, 2015.

"The relevant parts of the dists/ tree have been cleaned out already, removing the actual files from the pool/ hierarchy will happen using the usual automagical stuff from dak - so starting in about 1.5 days and then spread out a bit over the following dinstall runs," says Joerg Jaspert.

The removal of the SPARC architecture from Debian GNU/Linux does not mean that the distribution will no longer be installable on modern SPARC64 hardware, which is the next-generation SPARC architecture that supports 64-bit instructions.

Debian is well known for supporting a vast array of hardware architectures, among which we can mention 32-bit, 64-bit, IA64, s390, MIPS, PPC64el, PowerPC, Armel, ARMhf, MIPSel, and kFreeBSD.

Unofficially, the Debian operating system is also supported on the ARM, m68k, Hurd, m32, AVR32, Alpha, MIPS64el, HPPA, NetBSD, or1k, PowerPCSPE, sh, x32, and SPARC64 instruction set architectures.