With this opkg configuration: arch all 1 arch armhf 8 dist stable http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian main The update operation prints the following message: # opkg update Downloading http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/dists/stable/Release. Downloaded release files for dist stable. Downloading http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/dists/stable/main/binary-all/Packages. wget: server returned error: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Downloading http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/dists/stable/main/binary-armhf/Packages. Collected errors: * opkg_download_backend: Failed to download http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/dists/stable/main/binary-all/Packages, wget returned 1. The downloaded 'Release' file contains the following line: Architectures: armhf The debian-repo format description at [1] states the following about this field: The presents of the architecture all in this field indicates that the architecture-specific indexes do not include information about Architecture:all packages and have instead their own index file with the architecture all. Clients must download the all index files in this case, but must not download them if the Architectures field does not include all. Therefore from my point of view opkg should not try to download the 'all' index (unless the Architectures-field of the Release-file contains 'all'). [1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/Format#Architectures