It includes better EFI support than Debian 7 Wheezy did

Apr 23, 2015 06:50 GMT  ·  By

The Debian Project, through Steve McIntyre, announced on April 23 that the Debian CD/DVD/BD team is ready for the Debian 8.0 (codename Jessie) release, urging users to test the images before the unveiling of the final release of the highly anticipated operating system on April 25, 2015.

Therefore, we can report that Debian 8.0 Jessie will bring support for two new architectures, ARM64 and PowerPC64 Little-Endian. In addition, there will be an official amd64 OpenStack image for Debian 8, which will be generated weekly. The Debian Live images for 64- and 32-bit architectures will also be ready for the April 25 release.

"I'm happy with the progress we've made for debian-installer and related packages for the Jessie release. We're going to end up with a release that's better in a number of ways than what we've had before," says Steve McIntyre on behalf of the Debian CD/DVD/BD team.

Debian 8 Jessie brings dozens of EFI improvements

Another important feature of the Debian 8 Jessie operating system will be the enhanced support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) systems when compared with the previous version, Debian 7 Wheezy, which means that many issues have been resolved in the new release.

For example, a workaround has been added for broken EFI implementations in the form of an option in the installer that allows users to install the GRUB-EFI bootloader to the removable media path, and a fix for machines that support both BIOS and UEFI modes and did not offer a sensible choice of OS selection after installing Debian.

Lastly, support for Intel-based Apple Macs got a lot better, especially the Mac Mini computer, various mixed-mode EFI systems are now supported, including the 64-bit Intel Bay Trail platform, as well as the addition of 32-bit EFI to the i386 installation images.