Raspbian

What is Raspbian?

Raspbian is an unofficial port of Debian wheezy armhf developped by Mike Thompson and Peter Green. The compilation settings was adjusted to produce code that uses "hardware floating point", the "hard float" ABI and will run on the Raspberry Pi.

he first build was released on July 15, 2012.

The port is necessary because the official Debian wheezy armhf release is compatible only with versions of the ARM architecture later than the one used on the Raspberry Pi (ARMv7-A CPUs and higher, vs the Raspberry Pi's ARMv6 CPU).

The Debian squeeze image issued by the Raspberry Pi foundation was based on debian armel which uses software floating point and the "soft float" ABI. The foundation used the existing Debian port for less capable ARM devices. Therefore, it did not use of the Pi's processor's floating point hardware - reducing the Pi's performance during floating point intensive applications - or the advanced instructions of the ARMv6 CPU.

Last release

The last release of Raspbian was in February 2020.