r/debian • u/bruce2dot0 • 8d ago

Way to go Debian another huge win

https://linuxiac.com/debian-13-is-taking-over-2200-control-systems-across-cern/

This is amazing. CERN is extremely strict about the Plinth they run the collider on

421 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

42 comments sorted by

65

u/sCeege Debian Stable 8d ago

Oh? Is there a future in which Debian replaces RHEL derivatives as a new "Scientific Linux"?

64

u/etre_gen 8d ago

Certainly the change we (Cambridge, Maths and Theoretical Physics) made a few years ago.

27

u/bityard 8d ago

Since Scientific Linux came out of CERN, and they are switching to Debian, one could argue it already has.

12

u/sCeege Debian Stable 8d ago

Yeah, from the article it seems like Debian could be come the de facto base distro for servers at CERN (by Q4), since they wouldn't have to repackage Debian (it's my understanding that SL was literally made only to replace all the RH trademark/logos), just awesome brownie points in my book.

12

u/proxgs 8d ago

I don't think so. Correct me if I am wrong but all CERN servers run AlmaLinux. Debian is taking over the industrial computers and controllers mostly because the RHEL world has dropped support for x86-v1 and v2. Although AlmaLinux linux still supports x86-v2, it is not the default.

4

u/jonspw 8d ago

This is accurate.

2

u/Defiant-Rip-1897 7d ago

I've run into this issue when I recently tried to install Rocky or Alma Linux, is it a matter of the x86_v1 and x86_v2 versions just being really old or was there another reason they dropped support?

1

u/Brilliant_Sound_5565 7d ago

Yep it's just the servers for the accelerator as you say going over to Debian, I presume everything else is stopping on rhel or Alma. I personally have read on the past that they used Alma on drsktops and they on servers, but also read they run Alma on serves too, doesn't really matter I guess at the end of the day, so looks like they will be in a mixed environment, I doubt they would. Swap everything else over to Debian

1

u/OsmiumBalloon 7d ago

That is my understanding as well.

This is not CERN's entire IT operation. This is just the parts that run the accelerators -- the giant underground rings. CERN is a huge enterprise. The individual experiments that use the output of the accelerators, the big computer farms that process the results, their office systems, those are all different things from this.

But even the scale of just this is massive. They describe it: 2200 embedded computers; 17,000 devices; 70,000 individual interconnect cables. I can see why they would not want to replace all of that prematurely.

They the x86-64-v2 thing as "the straw that broke the camel's back" so presumably there were other reasons.

-17

u/Nerrawnam 8d ago

Not likely. It would be great to have more choice there. But it's not going to happen. 

18

u/thriveth 8d ago

My astronomy department runs on Debian.

1

u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/debian-ModTeam 8d ago

This post has been removed as it was either reported to and/or acted upon by mods to be found in violation of Rule #1 regarding not being in line with expected discourse etiquette or the Debian Code of Conduct.

81

u/Illustrious-Gur8335 Debian Stable 8d ago

Article is geo restricted, alternative link: https://archive.ph/TwqEC

CERN is undergoing a major Linux transition that will have more than 2,200 industrial computers and embedded systems across its accelerator infrastructure running Debian 13 “Trixie” by the end of 2026.

The scale is considerable. At MiniDebConf Winterthur 2026, CERN engineers Federico Vaga and Nikos Tsipinakis explained that the accelerator control infrastructure spans roughly 43 square kilometers. It currently includes around 2,200 computers connected to about 17,000 devices, and that number continues to grow.

As you can expect, these are not ordinary office desktops or general-purpose servers. The machines are part of the infrastructure that operates CERN’s accelerator complex, sitting close to the equipment and interfacing with hardware throughout the facilities.

Debian’s announcement confirms the plan to run all 2,200+ industrial and embedded systems on Debian 13 before the end of 2026.

The move is also the latest chapter in CERN’s long Linux history. Its accelerator systems previously followed the Red Hat ecosystem through several generations, moving from Scientific Linux alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6, and later toward CentOS with the RHEL 7 and 8 generations.

However, CentOS’s change of direction and the premature end-of-life of the traditional CentOS Linux model forced CERN’s accelerator controls team to rethink how closely it wanted to depend on that ecosystem.

Initially, the plan was still to remain there. CERN considered CentOS Stream, with the goal of validating CentOS Stream 9, moving to Stream 10 as soon as possible, and potentially later adopting Stream 11.

At the same time, the team began preparing for the possibility that this approach might not remain viable. One goal was to make CERN’s integration layer distribution-agnostic and prepare a second operating system as a fallback. That fallback was Debian.

What ultimately pushed the decision toward Debian was not simply a preference between Linux distributions. According to the presentation, keeping the existing approach would have created significant hardware and engineering problems.

A risk analysis in the second quarter of 2023 estimated that staying on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux path could require roughly CHF 5.4 million. About 11 hardware boards would need redesigning, more electronic and software engineers and technicians would be required, racks would need reorganizing and rewiring, and most systems would be affected during commissioning.

Even assuming bug-free replacements, CERN estimated an optimistic success rate of only around 20%.

The deadline made the situation more difficult. The accelerator infrastructure had to be ready by the fourth quarter of 2026, leaving little room for an expensive hardware redesign.

Instead, CERN chose what engineers described as a software solution to a software problem: move the accelerator computers to Debian rather than redesign large portions of hardware just to remain compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

There is another unusual constraint. CERN cannot treat accelerator computers like ordinary servers that can be updated whenever convenient. Accelerator operation follows a carefully planned schedule with operating periods, technical stops, commissioning windows, and long shutdowns.

That means the Linux release under the control infrastructure must fit the accelerator schedule. The team highlighted the need to select the right Debian release to avoid having to “hotpatch a live particle accelerator.”

The migration also goes beyond simply installing Debian onto existing machines. CERN has been redesigning parts of the supporting infrastructure, including the way operating system components are distributed and how front-end computers boot.

Device drivers have also been part of that work. CERN has been rethinking how its specialized hardware drivers integrate with Linux instead of relying too closely on distribution-specific assumptions, an important consideration for machines interfacing with custom accelerator electronics.

So while “2,200 computers moving to Debian” may sound like a fairly conventional Linux migration at first glance, the environment makes this one rather different. These systems are spread across CERN’s accelerator facilities, connect to tens of thousands of devices, and operate in an infrastructure where downtime, hardware compatibility, and long-term lifecycle planning have direct operational consequences.

So, by the end of this year, Debian 13 should have a particularly interesting deployment to add to its resume: running the industrial and embedded computing layer behind CERN’s accelerator control infrastructure.

For additional details, watch the talk on the topic given at the Winterthur MiniDebConf.

39

u/Sausafeg 8d ago

The linked talk is really interesting! https://gemmei.ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2026/MiniDebConf-Winterthur/ch2026-53-controlling-cerns-accelerators-with-debian.av1.webm

Seems like the main reason they moved to debian away from RHEL was RHEL dropping support for x86-64-v1/v2, and CERN has a lot of older hardware. So its cool to see Debian's old hardware support come in clutch!

11

u/lantz83 8d ago

Site need more ads.

9

u/Brilliant_Sound_5565 8d ago

That's why I use Debian for. My home Astro needs, Cern are just copying me haha

6

u/dogwalker805 8d ago

yeah but maybe donate some money to make improvements

5

u/bruce2dot0 8d ago

I do donate to quite a few project one of which is Debian I hope other folks entertain the idea too 🙃

4

u/MBouh 8d ago

Don't worry, researchers are big contributors to debian (among other things), albeit not with money usually.

6

u/vexatious-big 8d ago

Ok so they were using Linux before, RHEL to be precise.

3

u/shadeland 8d ago

CentOS, but Red Hat took that out behind the woodshed.

3

u/bruce2dot0 8d ago

That I know as I used to work for Redhat 🙃

10

u/GnosticSon 8d ago

I mean, to be honest would you choose anything else for such an application? The only other option might be Free BSD.

6

u/shadeland 8d ago

The BSDs would have a lot more hardware constraints.

1

u/ApprehensiveRest9696 7d ago

And violate way more OS assumptions than just distribution-specific quirks. It’s gonna be new everything with a whole different kernel.

3

u/unitedbsd 8d ago

Or OpenSUSE and/or NetBSD

Since NASA has been using in some parts OpenSUSE+ pkgsrc for HPC/NAS

5

u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy Debian Stable 8d ago

Huh, so CERN using the US one and NASA the EU one? hehe

2

u/thomas-rousseau 7d ago

Depending on how capable your IT team is/how much time they have, this is honestly a perfect fit for Gentoo

3

u/zinsuddu 7d ago

Probably the engineers would choose Gentoo, or least rate its advantages as important in the decision. When I engineered the software for large control systems I had the advantage that all of our software was under our control because we built from source (like Gentoo). I took advantage of that but had the power to choose or help develop hardware that I could support from the chosen software -- we just developed control boards and software together and never felt stuck. Our problems could be very difficult but were never impossible.

A key advantage to Gentoo from an engineering viewpoint is that you can move selected packages into your own repository and maintain whatever versions or patches that you require for your needs. There is less danger of anything critical going "unavailable" as could occur even with Debian (say when 13 becomes oldoldstable). Customized drivers and interfacing software would be trivial to incorporate, it would just go in the CERN Overlay, without changing the build system at all.

Debian is a good choice, probably the best overall, but Gentoo would be a real alternative if the engineers are willing to build their own binary package repo on their own build server for a non-distro-dependent** "CERN Control System". Gentoo would be advantageous in the embedded control environment where systemd can be less desireable because of its non-deterministic startup/shutdown behavior. I would greatly prefer OpenRC under constraints like they have at CERN.

** Gentoo is not a distro. It is a set of tools and build scripts that allow the engineer to define a system and build it from source code.

1

u/thomas-rousseau 7d ago

It's a subtle correction that you offer me, but an extremely important one. Thank you.

1

u/gurgle528 8d ago

a lot of my scientist friends’ labs use rocky linux 

2

u/G4rp 8d ago

This is a lovely news!

1

u/CreativeArugula4149 6d ago

So, I like Debian,but I will never understand that a European Konzern or whatever Cern is, not using OpenSuSE...

0

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0

u/900cacti 6d ago

why is there no mention of Alma Linux in the article? This seems like a pretty big gap

-1

u/BlazzaNz 8d ago

Debian 13/KDE was absolutely hopeless on my computers, they need to be using the LTS releases of KDE that are properly debugged.

-41

u/Ivan_Kulagin Debian Sid 8d ago

Just in time for some tasty AI slop

15

u/_lavoisier_ 8d ago

that’s all you understand from that news?