Debian 11 [bullseye](https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBullseye) was [released on August 14 2021](https://www.debian.org/News/2021/20210814)). Tor
started the upgrade to bullseye shortly after and hopes to complete
the process before the [buster](howto/upgrades/buster) EOL, [one year after the stable
release](https://www.debian.org/security/faq#lifespan), so normally around August 2022.
It is an aggressive timeline, which might be missed. It is tracked in
the GitLab issue tracker under the [% Debian 11 bullseye upgrade](https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones/5)
milestone. Upgrades will be staged in batches, see [TPA-RFC-20](policy/tpa-rfc-20-bullseye-upgrades) for
details.
Starting from now on however, no new Debian 10 buster machine will be
created: all new machines will run Debian 11 bullseye.
Debian 12 [bookworm](https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBookworm)[entered freeze in January 19th 2023](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/01/msg00004.html). TPA
is in the process of studying the upgrade immediately after the
bullseye upgrade is completed. We have a hard deadline of [one year
after the stable release](https://www.debian.org/security/faq#lifespan), which gives us a few years to complete
this process. Typically, however, we try to upgrade during the freeze
to report (and contribute to) issues we find during the upgrade, as
those are easier to fix during the freeze than after. In that sense,
the deadline is more like the third quarter of 2023.
It is an aggressive timeline, which will like be missed. It is tracked
in the GitLab issue tracker under the [% Debian 12 bookworm
upgrade](https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones/6) milestone. Upgrades will be staged in batches, see
[TPA-RFC-20](policy/tpa-rfc-20-bullseye-upgrades) for details on how that was performed in bullseye.
As soon as when the bullseye upgrade is completed, we hope to phase
out the bullseye installers so that new machines are setup with
bullseye.
This page aims at documenting the upgrade procedure, known problems
