Debian GNU/Linux 12 har stöd för 9 större arkitekturer och ett flertal variationer av varje arkitektur kända som ”varianter”.

Det här dokumentet täcker in installationen för 64-bit ARM--arkitekturen med Linux-kärnan. Om du letar efter information om någon av de andra arkitekturerna som Debian stöder kan du se på sidorna för Debian-porteringar.

Det här är den första officiella utgåvan av Debian GNU/Linux för arkitekturen 64-bit ARM. Vi tycker att den har bevisat sig vara tillräckligt bra för att ges ut. Dock har den inte haft samma exponering (och följaktligen blivit testad av användarna) som andra arkitekturer har haft, och du kan kanske påträffa några fel. Använd vårt Felhanteringssystem för att rapportera problem; se till att påpeka fakta att felet gäller för plattformen 64-bit ARM med kärnan Linux. Det kan vara nödvändigt att använda sändlistan debian-arm också.

The ARM architecture has evolved over time and modern ARM processors provide features which are not available in older models. Debian therefore provides three ARM ports to give the best support for a very wide range of different machines:

Technically, all currently available ARM CPUs can be run in either endian mode (big or little), but in practice the vast majority use little-endian mode. All of Debian/arm64, Debian/armhf and Debian/armel support only little-endian systems.

ARM-system är mycket mer heterogena än de som bygger på den i386/amd64-baserade PC-arkitekturen, så supportsituationen kan vara mycket mer komplicerad.

The ARM architecture is used mainly in so-called ”system-on-chip” (SoC) designs. These SoCs are designed by many different companies, often with vastly varying hardware components even for the very basic functionality required to bring the system up. Older versions of the ARM architecture have seen massive differences from one SoC to the next, but ARMv8 (arm64) is much more standardised and so is easier for the Linux kernel and other software to support.

Serverversioner av ARMv8-hårdvara konfigureras vanligtvis med hjälp av Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) och Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) standarder. Dessa två ger vanliga, enhetsoberoende sätt att starta och konfigurera maskinvara. De är också vanliga i x86 PC-världen.

Arm64/AArch64/ARMv8 hardware became available quite late in the Debian Bookworm release cycle so not many platforms had support merged in the mainline kernel version by the time of this release; this is the main requirement to have debian-installer working on them. The following platforms are known to be supported by Debian/arm64 in this release. There is only one kernel image, which supports all the listed platforms.

When using debian-installer on non-UEFI systems, you may have to manually make the system bootable at the end of the installation, e.g. by running the required commands in a shell started from within debian-installer. flash-kernel knows how to set up an X-Gene system booting with U-Boot.

Multiprocessor support — also called ”symmetric multiprocessing” or SMP — is available for this architecture. Having multiple processors in a computer was originally only an issue for high-end server systems but has become common in recent years nearly everywhere with the introduction of so called ”multi-core” processors. These contain two or more processor units, called ”cores”, in one physical chip.

Standard Debian12 kärnavbilden har kompilerats med SMP-stöd. Den kan också användas på icke-SMP-system utan problem.

Debian's support for graphical interfaces is determined by the underlying support found in X.Org's X11 system, and the kernel. Basic framebuffer graphics is provided by the kernel, whilst desktop environments use X11. Whether advanced graphics card features such as 3D-hardware acceleration or hardware-accelerated video are available, depends on the actual graphics hardware used in the system and in some cases on the installation of additional ”firmware” blobs (see Avsnitt 2.2, ”Enheter som kräver fast programvara”).

Nearly all ARM machines have the graphics hardware built-in, rather than being on a plug-in card. Some machines do have expansion slots which will take graphics cards, but that is a rarity. Hardware designed to be headless with no graphics at all is quite common. Whilst basic framebuffer video provided by the kernel should work on all devices that have graphics, fast 3D graphics invariably needs binary drivers to work. The situation is changing quickly but at the time of the bookworm release free drivers for nouveau (Nvidia Tegra K1 SoC) and freedreno (Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs) are available in the release. Other hardware needs non-free drivers from 3rd parties.

Detaljer om grafikhårdvaraoch pekenheter kan hittas på https://wiki.freedesktop.org/xorg/. Debian 12 skickar med X.Org version 7.7.

Nästan alla nätverkskort (NIC) som stöds av Linux-kärnan stöds även av installationssystemet; modulära drivrutiner ska vanligtvis läsas in automatiskt.

På 64-bit ARM finns stöd för de flesta inbyggda Ethernet-enheter och moduler för ytterligare PCI- och USB-enheter tillhandahålls.

Linux har stöd för ett stort antal maskinvaruenheter såsom möss, skrivare, skannrar, PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard och USB-enheter. Dock krävs inte de flesta av dessa enheter vid installation av systemet.