4.6.2. Architectures

In the first days, the Linux kernel was only available for Intel i386 (or greater) platforms, and so was Debian. But as Linux became more and more popular, the kernel was ported to other architectures and Debian started to support them. And as if supporting so much hardware was not enough, Debian decided to build some ports based on other Unix kernels, like hurd and kfreebsd.

Debian GNU/Linux 1.3 was only available as i386. Debian 2.0 shipped for i386 and m68k architectures. Debian 2.1 shipped for the i386, m68k, alpha, and sparc architectures. Since then Debian has grown hugely. Debian 9 supports a total of ten Linux architectures (amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el, and s390x) and two kFreeBSD architectures (kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64).

Information for developers and users about the specific ports are available at the Debian Ports web pages.