2026 MiniDebConf Cambridge

Héctor Orón Martínez (zumbi@debian.org)


History of Debian Embedded & ARM ports

Debian 'arm'

  • Initial ARM Linux work by Russel King for the RiscPC
  • Scott Bamborough and co for the rebel Netwinder made a lot of stuff work
  • Jim Pick did the initial Debian port
  • Lots of 'unsigned char' fixing and unaligned access issues to work through
  • There was a lot of new board support and then the switch to EABI

ARM and StrongARM

  • Netwinder
  • RiscPC
  • Shark
  • Lart
  • Thecus N2100

Debian 'armel'

  • Code sourcery 1st cross-tools q3 2005 GCC v3.4.4
  • 2005: Early Linux adopters (montavista, nokia)
  • Debian port started q1 2006 - all new
  • ADS/Lennert Buytenhek working port Jan 2007 (v4t build)
  • DD-signed (Riku Voipio) buildd announced April 2007 (v4t build)
  • Debian ARM EABI port wiki page
  • Last stable release (64-bit time_t ready) that included it, that was Debian 13 "trixie"

ARM EABI

  • Marvell Orion
  • Marvell Kirkwood
  • Intel IXP4xx
  • Intel IOP3xx
  • Versatile

Emdebian 'cross-toolchain'

  • pre-lenny cross gcc-2.95
  • Emdebian cross toolchains:
    • arm, armel, mips, mipsel, powerpc, sparc, s390, m68k, hppa, alpha, ia64, i386 and amd64
  • 2004 Nikita V. Youshchenko creating and updating patches for cross gcc-3.x
  • 2005 Héctor Orón Martínez picking up from Nikita (gcc-3.x, gcc-4.x, cross gdb, multilib)
  • 2014 Cross toolchain merged into Debian archive in December
  • 2014 Wookey and Marcin Juszkiewicz pick up maintenance and enable multiarch (Linaro)
  • 2015 Matthias Klose current gcc-cross package uploader and maintainer in Debian (synced uploads with native compilers)

Emdebian 'grip'

  • 2009-2014 Emdebian grip (Neil Williams)
  • Filter binary packages, removed relevant files and repacked them. Reducing the overall size of the package, the package meta-data and final installation size of the package.
  • Innovations: multistrap (evolved to mmdebstrap), dpkg-vendor, dpkg filters, build profiles and others
  • Sizes:
    • A basic multistrap of Emdebian Grip (sid-grip) came out at 56Mb installed, not compressed
    • A basic multistrap of Debian (sid) comes out at 90Mb installed, not compressed
    • A basic debootstrap of Debian (sid) comes out at 269Mb installed, not compressed

Emdebian 'crush' & 'baked'

  • Crush: cross build minimal userland, replacing coreutils with busybox
  • Baked: cross build minimal userland, ready to bake (dd) without updating capabilities
  • This morning at debian-cross BoF, some people might be wanting to pick up this ideas
  • Inspired Helmut's rebootstrap work

Debian 'armhf'

  • 2009 Initial port done by Konstantinos Margaritis and Héctor Orón Martínez
  • ...sponsored by Toby Churchill and Genesys for Efika MX devices
  • Linaro/Canonical (Loïc Minier and others) helped a lot on upstream hardfloat support
  • Debian ARM HardFloat wiki page

ARM EABI Hardfloat

  • Freescale mx5
  • Marvel devboards as buildd at ARM data center (Wookey and Steve McIntyre)
  • Later moved to armmp unified kernel and device tree support

Debian 'arm64'

ARM 64 bit hardware support

  • Boot loading: u-boot, ACPI tables and UEFI
  • arm64 unified kernel

Thanks for attending this lighting talk

Thanks to all people I have not mentioned but was involved along the years

Specially: Peter “p2” De Schrijver, Thiemo Seufer, Roger Shimizu, Steve Langasek, Adam Conrad,

Alexander Shiskin, Martin Michlmayr, Joey Hess, Guillem Jover, Dima Kogan, helmut,

Johannes Schauer, Ben H., broonie, Vince Sanders, Emmanuel Roca, Peter Green, ...


.. and many others, find them at: