Port Tails to ARM platforms

Making Tails run on ARM is required to make it work on Apply M1 and M2 processors, some Chromebooks and tablets, etc.

ARM platforms are very diverse and we couldn't target all possible ARM platforms. Also, this would be a massive engineering challenge, that would require lots of upstream work in Debian and Linux in general and would take years to achieve.

The content of this issue is rough notes and we currently have no short-term plans on working on support for ARM or Apple M1 or M2 processors.

Big picture

• Identify what kind of target ARM platform we should support.
• How do we get an OS to boot from removable media on these platforms?
• Does all of the software we ship build+work fine on these platforms?

Research from 2016–2017 by the Tails team

• https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/ARM_platforms/

Research from 2017–2021 by @N9iu7pk

• statPackages.txt
• statPackages.txt
• statPackages.txt
• 20160217_build-state.txt
• signature.asc
• 20160531_buildState.txt
• rpi2torbrowser.png
• tails gitlab wiki - documentation / progress

Research from 2024–2025 by @noisycoil

• https://lists.autistici.org/message/20240119.134904.dc3ca7e2.en.html