The removal of the mipsel port from Debian unstable/experimental was announced by the Debian developers on the mailing list .
mipsel used to be one of the oldest architectures in Debian, after i386 and AMD64. Debian 12 "Bookworm" will be the last release to support the MIPS little-endian architecture.
Debian's reasons for abandoning the MIPS little-endian architecture include:
- The Year 2038 "Y2038" Problem Has Not Been Solved
- 2G user space memory limit
- and the lack of manpower among Debian developers to maintain the architecture.
As a result, mipsel will be removed from the official Debian distribution of architectures, while MIPS64EL will remain as a 64-bit little-endian variant.
Technology media Phoronix believes that those users who are still running 32-bit MIPS little-endian are likely to be running on old embedded devices such as routers, so it is impossible to frequently update to newer Debian versions. Given this, after the recent Debian 12 release, it was reasonable to remove it from experimental/testing given the lack of developer resources and other mentioned technical constraints.
See the mailing list for details .