Kali Linux 2025.3 Drops Support for Raspberry Pi 1, Zero W and Other ARMel Devices

Kali Linux is the world’s most widely used penetration testing distribution, trusted by cybersecurity professionals, ethical hackers, and researchers. Developed and maintained by Offensive Security, it provides a rolling release model and a comprehensive toolkit designed for offensive security, reverse engineering, and digital forensics.

Now, with the arrival of Kali Linux 2025.3, the distribution takes another step forward, introducing new tools and phasing out legacy architectures.

🆕 Kali Linux 2025.3: What's New?

Kali Linux 2025.3 introduces various updates, with the most notable being the ten new tools that include Caido for web security auditing, Gemini CLI as an open source AI agent, Krbrelayx for Kerberos relaying, and llm-tools-nmap, which brings AI-powered network discovery and scanning.

Then there's an upgrade for the wireless researchers in the house, who will be pleased with the return of Nexmon support, bringing monitor and injection capabilities back to Broadcom and Cypress Wi-Fi chipsets, including the onboard card of the Raspberry Pi 5.

For desktop users, the Xfce VPN-IP panel plugin has been improved. It now allows monitoring of specific network interfaces, which is especially useful for managing multiple VPN connections, and provides more precise monitoring.

Finally, Kali is dropping ARMel support, marking the end of compatibility with older devices such as the Raspberry Pi 1, Raspberry Pi Zero W, and similar boards. This follows Debian’s lead and paves the way for a stronger focus on 64-bit ARM images.

🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements

We round out this release coverage with a few other changes:

• New community wallpapers were added.
• Boot animation issues have been resolved.
• Updated all libraries, BusyBox binaries, Gradle, and Java to the latest versions.
• Replaced deprecated AsyncTask with Executer, improving threading and background task performance.
• Android support improved from API 21 to API 34+, including bootkali and killkali scripts in the Android (SU) shell.

📥 Get Kali Linux 2025.3

You can download this release directly from the official website, which also provides live and weekly testing images.

For existing users, they can update to Kali Linux 2025.3 by running the following commands:

echo "deb http://http.kali.org/kali kali-rolling main contrib non-free non-free-firmware" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade

cp -vrbi /etc/skel/. ~/

-f /var/run/reboot-required ] && sudo reboot -f

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