Debian Project adds Security Support for AMD64

August 11th, 2005

The Debian project adds security support for the stable amd64 distribution. This port is not yet part of the Debian archive, but it will be included in unstable/testing soon and users already benefit from security updates distributed via security.debian.org.

A special advisory will be released soon by the security team to cover newly built amd64 packages for all security updates since the release of sarge. These packages will replace already existing files in the proposed-updates directory in the amd64 archive.

Because the project has released version 3.1 (codename: sarge) of its distribution without the amd64 port due to technical reasons, the porters have released their packages on a different server with only minimal differences to the Debian 3.1 archive. This port will be included in the unstable and testing distribution soon.

As a first step to adding full support for the amd64 port the ftpmasters have added this architecture to security.debian.org and connected a new build daemon to the archive. Future security advisories will therefore list 12 architectures for the sarge release and users of this port will be able to use the regular source for security updates as well.

Future Plans for full AMD64 Support

Several issues have to be resolved before the amd64 port can be fully included. Most importantly the ftpmaster service needs to be moved to its final destination, as its former hosting offer has been terminated and it is now hosted in a temporary location. A detailed list of things to do follows:

  1. Add security support
  2. Move ftpmaster to its final location
  3. Implement the archive split
  4. Add amd64 architecture
  5. Rebuild the archive with regards to amd64
  6. Eventually have full support for amd64

Resources for the AMD64 Port

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