Hi all,
The Gazebo team is going to stop producing .deb packages for the armhf (32-bit ARM hard-float) architecture. Going forward, the supported Debian/Ubuntu architectures for Gazebo binaries are amd64 and arm64.
Why
- The ARM platforms Gazebo users actually run on (Raspberry Pi OS, NVIDIA Jetson, ARM cloud instances) all ship 64-bitimages today, and new ARM Cortex cores have been 64-bit only since 2023.
- Some upstream distributions are winding down their armhf ports, and key Gazebo dependencies such as DART do not support 32-bit targets.
- Official ROS 2 binaries are only available for amd64 and arm64.
- armhf builds consume buildfarm capacity, delay releases when their builders fail.
What changes
-
armhf is considered end-of-life across all Gazebo releases, including the currently supported ones (Fortress, Harmonic, Ionic, Jetty), in the same way an Ubuntu release reaches EOL. No new armhf packages will be published after next Monday 21st of September 2026.
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armhf packages already published on packages.osrfoundation.org remain available but will not receive further updates.
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Building Gazebo from source on armhf may still work, but it is neither supported nor tested by the team.
Our release documentation already noted that the amd64/arm64/armhf combination may not be available for every Ubuntu/Debian/Gazebo release; this makes it official for armhf.
If you depend on Gazebo armhf packages, please reply here or comment on the tracking issue: