Debian GNU/Linux 12 supports 9 major architectures and several variations of each architecture known as “flavors”.

This document covers installation for the 64-bit MIPS (little-endian) architecture using the Linux kernel. If you are looking for information on any of the other Debian-supported architectures take a look at the Debian-Ports pages.

This is the first official release of Debian GNU/Linux for the 64-bit MIPS (little-endian) architecture. We feel that it has proven itself sufficiently to be released. However, because it has not had the exposure (and hence testing by users) that some other architectures have had, you may encounter a few bugs. Use our Bug Tracking System to report any problems; make sure to mention the fact that the bug is on the 64-bit MIPS (little-endian) platform using the Linux kernel. It can be necessary to use the debian-mips mailing list as well.

Multiprocessor support — also called “symmetric multiprocessing” or SMP — is available for this architecture, and is supported by a precompiled Debian kernel image. Depending on your install media, this SMP-capable kernel may or may not be installed by default. This should not prevent installation, since the standard, non-SMP kernel should boot on SMP systems; the kernel will simply use the first CPU.

In order to take advantage of multiple processors, you should check to see if a kernel package that supports SMP is installed, and if not, choose an appropriate kernel package.

You can also build your own customized kernel to support SMP. You can find a discussion of how to do this in Section 8.5, “Compiling a New Kernel”. At this time (kernel version 3.16) the way you enable SMP is to select “Multi-Processing support” in the “Kernel type” section of the kernel config.

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 Section 2.2, “Devices Requiring Firmware”).

Details on supported graphics hardware and pointing devices can be found at https://wiki.freedesktop.org/xorg/. Debian 12 ships with X.Org version 7.7.

Almost any network interface card (NIC) supported by the Linux kernel should also be supported by the installation system; drivers should normally be loaded automatically.

Linux supports a large variety of hardware devices such as mice, printers, scanners, PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard and USB devices. However, most of these devices are not required while installing the system.