The older Raspberry Pi boards have had a long life, serving faithfully since 2012. Frankly, their continued support is a rarity these days — it’s truly incredible that an up-to-date OS image can still be downloaded for them in 2025. All good things must eventually come to an end though, and perhaps one of the first signs of that moment for the BCM2385 could be evident in Phoronix’s report on Debian dropping support for MIPS64EL & ARMEL architectures. Both are now long in the tooth and other than ARMEL in the Pi, rarely encountered now, so were it not for the little board from Cambridge this might hardly be news. But what does it mean for the older Pi?
It’s first important to remind readers that there’s no need to panic just yet, as the support is going not for the mainstream Debian releases, but the unstable and experimental ones. The mainstream Debian support period for the current releases presumably including the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS extends until 2030, which tallies well with Raspberry Pi’s own end-of-life date for their earlier boards. But it’s a salutary reminder that that the clock’s ticking, should (like some of us) you be running an older Pi. You’ve got about five years.
still got mine, never really used it for much of anything. i did a micro tablet with a lego case and an lcd and ran some games on it. ive since built 2 other pi tablets with 3d printed parts. i realized i wasn’t using them beyond getting them running and simply stopped buying them. but they can still be useful in a pinch.
You can use it to control a 3D printer
Can a Pi-1 handle streaming a camera view of the printer AND running the printer at the same time without any slowdowns? I notice that even with my Pi-2 it’s a little faster to print directly from SD than to use Octoprint. Or at least it was. I still prefer Octoprint so I haven’t really tried that way since before I upgraded from RAMPS to a 32-bit board.
Running openvpn server on this board is perfect :)
Given EoS status it might even end up being a very open VPN.
If you don’t need it you should donate it to your local school so that children can learn STEM in classes…
Gather around class… we are going to take turns watching one kid at a time hack on one Pi.
Mmmmm… nah!
A lot of schools already have tablets or laptops for the kids now. I think I’d rather buy a box of cheap Arduino clones, sensors, lights and other accessories for the class. Then I’d pick an easy beginner, kid-friendly dev environment for it and ask IT to make it standard on all the kids devices.
But hey, I’m not a teacher. Maybe there is something I don’t know.
You wanted to be smart but you proven yourself dumb. Linux is a UNIX-like multi-threaded, multi-user system. I see no problem if you create account for each student and they will log on to R-Pi by SSH.
DOS era is long over bro :)
Mine is running as a PiHole, it’s been doing absolutely sterling service for years.
I’ll retire it when it fails or I can no longer get new SD cards for it
Just when I found a use for most of my old Pi1s.
They’re a perfect snapcast client for synchronous audio playback on a network.
I mean, you say “you’ve got 5 years…” but in reality if you’re running something on this, and it’s so reliable you half forgot about it, it’s unlikely to have been updated in the last 5 years, which means it can run until something fails.
Depends on what you are doing with it – for a long time I ran a few simple web facing servers on my old Pi 1 for that low power 100% uptime, and that would be something you have only 5 years on if you kept it running. As web facing and not updated is just a bad bad idea.
I have since moved on to something with more networking speed and compute so I can do a bit more on the one 100% uptime system, but that only Pi could have just kept on ticking ‘forever’ doing the old job.
agreed! My central heating runs on a raspberry pi – 100% uptime required there :)
For a few years it didn’t see very many updates, although there was only one port exposed, and some minimal security on it – enough to keep the baddies out.
I’ve gotten better about updating now
Soon running something on RPi will be called retrocomputing:)
Settle down to some retro gaming using a retro edition of your SNES emulator on your retro RPi gen 1a.
Suddenly I want a Pepsi Clear…
The desktop OS is too painfully slow, and for the command line I found my typing is faster than the keypolling. It can still handle a few tasks, but for this model it was assumed you woild rather r&d on an real PC and then move the files to the Pi for deployment.
My impression is that ARMv6 was never successful beyond the BCM2835. There were lots of SoCs with ARM926 (ARMv5) and then the next ARM cores for Linux that saw widespread adoption were Cortex-A8/9/5/7 (ARMv7).
If I remember correctly, the biggest difference between ARMv6 and ARMv7 from an application point of view is that you have dedicated barrier instructions instead of them being mapped to coprocessor instructions. Grepping through the ARM ARM, I see that ARMv7 also has LDREX/STREX for sizes other than 32 bits and there is a CLREX instruction. The division instructions of ARMv7 are optional. Don’t know if Debian assumes they exist. But it should be possible to handle all of this by using Glibc’s mechanism for searching libraries in different folders based on the available CPU features. The BCM2835 even has VFP, so that it should be possible to use the armhf calling conventions.
My understanding is that the Pi Zero (and Zero W) use essentially the same processor as the original Pi (as does the original compute module, if anyone still has one of those), so those will also be affected by the loss of ARMEL support.
For me, and I think probably a lot of other people, this is a much bigger deal than the loss of original pi support. I still find good uses for the zero boards I have. You wouldn’t think it’d make a huge difference, but they’re small enough to be unobtrusive or portable in places that the pi is just slightly too big. They still make nice streaming audio endpoints, USB SDR receivers, bespoke webcams, random-sensor-to-xml/MQTT servers, and even classic computer/classic emulators (if your idea of classic is itself “classic” enough – think 80s to very early 90s).
On the bright side, most of my projects are pretty walled off from potential security risks, and if somebody does manage to hack one, the joke’s on them, because they are dog slow – Once you have a few services running, you can barely even run a bash terminal over ssh