Debian has officially promoted loong64 to a supported architecture, following more than 2 years of development in Debian Ports. With this change, loong64 is expected to ship as a fully supported architecture in the upcoming Debian 14 release, codenamed Forky, provided the remaining integration work proceeds as planned.

The announcement was made on the debian-devel-announce mailing list, as official status means loong64 will follow the same build, release, and security processes as Debian’s other primary architectures.

The initial bootstrap phase has already made substantial progress. An initial set of 112 packages was manually built and imported from Debian Ports, which was sufficient to create a working chroot environment and bring the first build daemon online.

According to the announcement, the full bootstrap process is expected to take about a week. The exact timeline will depend on whether additional build instances are added in the coming days, which would significantly increase package build throughput and shorten the overall completion time.

Loong64 is the 64-bit architecture associated with the LoongArch instruction set, developed by China-based Loongson.

Once the bootstrap is complete and archive coverage reaches the required level, loong64 will be treated like any other official Debian architecture, including participation in release milestones, installer availability, and long-term maintenance throughout the Debian 14 lifecycle.

For more information, see the announcement.

Bobby Borisov

Bobby, an editor-in-chief at Linuxiac, is a Linux professional with over 20 years of experience. With a strong focus on Linux and open-source software, he has worked as a Senior Linux System Administrator, Software Developer, and DevOps Engineer for small and large multinational companies.