Debian GNU/Linux 9 支持十一种主要的体系和一些称为 “flavors” 的衍生品种。

本文档主要讲述的是 32-bit soft-float ARM 体系下的安装。如果您在寻找其他 Debian 所支持的体系的信息，请访问 Debian-Ports 网页。

The ARM architecture has evolved over time and modern ARM processors provide features which are not available in older models. Debian therefore provides three ARM ports to give the best support for a very wide range of different machines:

大多数的 ARM CPU 可以运行在(big 或 little)任一 endian 模式下。但是当前绝大多少系统的实现都是使用 little-endian 模式。Debian 现在也仅支持 little-endian ARM 系统。

ARM systems are much more heterogeneous than those based on the i386/amd64-based PC architecture, so the support situation can be much more complicated.

The ARM architecture is used mainly in so-called “system-on-chip” (SoC) designs. These SoCs are designed by many different companies with vastly varying hardware components even for the very basic functionality required to bring the system up. System firmware interfaces have been increasingly standardised over time, but especially on older hardware firmware/boot interfaces vary a great deal, so on these systems the Linux kernel has to take care of many system-specific low-level issues which would be handled by the mainboard's BIOS in the PC world.

At the beginning of the ARM support in the Linux kernel, the hardware variety resulted in the requirement of having a separate kernel for each ARM system in contrast to the “one-fits-all” kernel for PC systems. As this approach does not scale to a large number of different systems, work was done to allow booting with a single ARM kernel that can run on different ARM systems. Support for newer ARM systems is now implemented in a way that allows the use of such a multiplatform kernel, but for several older systems a separate specific kernel is still required. Because of this, the standard Debian distribution only supports installation on a selected number of such older ARM systems, alongside the newer systems which are supported by the ARM multiplatform kernels (called “armmp”) in Debian/armhf.

The following platforms are supported by Debian/armel; they require platform-specific kernels.

Debian 能支持的显卡取决于底层的 X.Org's X11 的支持。流行的 PC 上，图形显示器通常工作地很好。至于高级的显卡功能，比如 3D 硬件加速或硬件视频加速是否可用，由系统所使用的具体显示硬件和所要安装的额外“固件(firmware)”决定(参阅 第 2.2 节 “需要固件的设备”)。极个别的情况下使用基本的显示功能也需要安装额外的固件，但这是罕有的例子。

Nearly all ARM machines have the graphics hardware built-in, rather than being on a plug-in card. Some machines do have expansion slots which will take graphics cards, but that is a rarity. Hardware designed to be headless with no graphics at all is quite common. Whilst basic framebuffer video provided by the kernel should work on all devices that have graphics, fast 3D graphics invariably needs binary drivers to work. The situation is changing quickly but at the time of the stretch release free drivers for nouveau (Nvidia Tegra K1 SoC) and freedreno (Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs) are available in the release. Other hardware needs non-free drivers from 3rd parties.

对显卡和其他定点设备的具体支持情况，见 http://xorg.freedesktop.org/。 Debian 9 包含 X.Org 7.7 版。

几乎所有被 Linux 内核支持的网卡 (NIC) 都被安装系统支持；驱动程序通常会自动加载。

32-bit soft-float ARM 上，支持大多数内置的以太网设备，并提供额外的 PCI 和 USB 设备模块。

Linux 支持众多的硬件设备，比如：鼠标、打印机、扫描仪、PCMCIA 和 USB 设备。然而，在安装系统的时候，并不需要其中的大部分设备。