Debian is a free Operating System (OS), also known as Debian GNU/Linux. It provides a wide range of application software, and comes with a total of over 118,000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation for various machines or embedded devices.

The Debian Linux SDK distribution composes of NXP-specific custom components and open source software developed by the community-supported Debian Project. It aims to provide an easy-to-use and convenient development solution for users' quick evaluation with widely available deb packages on the ARM64 platforms of NXP.

The Debian Linux SDK distribution uses Flexbuild (a flexible and easy-to-use build system developed by NXP) to generate the BSP composite firmware (including ATF, U-Boot, OP-TEE, kernel, DTB, peripheral firmware, initramfs) and Debian images. It compiles NXP-specific hardware-accelerated components for various hardware blocks and peripherals (such as GPU, NPU, VPU, ISP, SEC, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, and Audio) based on Debian runtime dependencies.

Users can use Flexbuild to easily build Debian-based RootFS, Linux kernel, BSP components, and miscellaneous Userspace applications for various use cases (like graphics, multimedia, networking, connectivity, security, and AI/ML) to streamline the system build with flexible customization and efficient CI/CD. Flexbuild Git repository is available at GitHub.

Users can also use the flex-installer tool to easily install various Distros to the target storage device (SD/eMMC card or USB/SATA/NVMe disk). For details, see Quick Start with Debian.

NXP provides Debian-based SDK source and prebuilt demo images as Linux offering for MPU platforms. The following table provides an overview of the Debian Linux SDK distribution.

Overview of Debian Linux SDK
Distro Variant
  • Debian Base (basic packages)
Deployment of the prebuilt Debian distro images NXP provides a script tool flex-installer to automatically download and install the prebuilt BSP image and Debian RootFS image with customizable partitions of the target storage device. The entire disk space of the SD/eMMC card or USB/SATA disk is accessible with the formatted EXT4 partition. flex-installer can also convert the tarball images to a single .wic image. Optionally, you can use the balenaEtcher tool to flash the BSP composite firmware into the SD card on the Windows host machine if the Linux host is not available.
Supported boards
  • i.MX 8M Plus EVK
  • i.MX 8M Plus FRDM
  • i.MX 8M Mini EVK
  • i.MX 8QuadMax MEK
  • i.MX 95 15x15 EVK
  • i.MX 95 15x15 FRDM
  • i.MX 93 11x11 EVK
  • i.MX 93 11x11 FRDM
  • i.MX 91 11x11 EVK
  • i.MX 91 11x11 FRDM
  • i.MX 91S 11x11 FRDM
  • Layerscape LS1028ARDB
  • Layerscape LS1043ARDB
  • Layerscape LS1046ARDB
  • Layerscape LX2160ARDB

Host Requirement to build Debian Linux SDK with Flexbuild
  • Debian 12 or 13.
  • Build in Docker hosted on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Duration of build

30 minutes - 3 hours.
Consumed disk space 30 GB - 50 GB.
Installing a new package Installing a package is as simple as running apt install <package> since there is a deb package manager for Debian.
Patching source of component It is easy to patch board-specific components in Flexbuild, but inconvenient to patch the upstream Debian package because they are installed as deb packages.