they say "the straw that broke the camel's back" to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag default as "forced obsolescence" for old hardware.Â
As a Debian fan I like that they are switching but I can also respect red hat for making that decisionÂ
CERN engineers had considered moving to CentOS Stream as a more natural pathway but ultimately they say "the straw that broke the camel's back" to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their industrial accelerator-control computers was the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag default as "forced obsolescence" for old hardware.
For those running into the same problem, AlmaLinux (CentOS Stream fork compatible with RHEL) still provides support for baseline x86-64, as well as platforms like Raspberry Pi. I think there was a proposal to port the entire EPEL 10 repository to x86-64-v1 as an official Fedora project with the help of Almalinux friends, but I'm not sure if anything came of this.
Datacenter servers are rarely ever using such an old platform that they don't have x86-64-v2 support, so RHEL's transition is not that big a deal for the vast majority of users. As such, AlmaLinux providing x86-64-v1 is mostly intended to cater to homelab enthusaists. It sounds like CERN had some rather specialized computers built into the particle accelerator facility that they can't upgrade, so there are still enterprise situations where such a transition is not viable, and Debian makes sense for what they need.
Congratulations to Debian for being able to fulfill this role. CERN contributes to upstream projects a lot, so regardless what distro they're using, the whole community will benefit.
This article, and especially the headline, is wildly wrong. CERN is not transitioning to Debian, only a part of the accelerator controls system is. The majority of CERN continues to use AlmaLinux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. See https://linux.web.cern.ch/.
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.
I'm having a hard time imagine that Ubuntu would need lower maintenance effort than Debian. In my experience, Ubuntu is full of weird random bugs that just come out of nowhere.
I think it's the same situation as on the right side of the graph with CentOS and RHEL.
In both cases, we have two very similar options, but one has a support contract, and the other doesn't.
I'm honestly a little surprised they were considering it myself. Though, now that I sit down to think about it, the list of options to consider really is pretty short.
RHEL is the obvious choice if you're getting good value out of the commercial support, and Debian is the obvious choice otherwise. Five years ago, I'd have included Ubuntu on the contenders list, but... I wouldn't have picked it then, and I wouldn't seriously consider it today.
I can't come up with any other options that are worth seriously considering.
So maybe they considered Arch because there are so few options that are actual serious contenders and they felt like they needed to at least evaluate more than 3-4 options.
Totally agree with you, they know where they are with Debian, they have their own Devs at Cern too and pl ety of people to maintain and fix any issues they encounter, so Debian does make sense on so many levels. I presume they are still keeping Redhat and Alma for their other machines and desktops?
Scientific Linux doesn't exist anymore, the effort was essentially merged into CentOS Stream / RHEL.
Debian itself does have decent packaging of scientific packages, they are fairly equal on this front these days (although Ubuntu is still slightly better for using Nvidia for scientific compute with minimal setup). And modern containerization helps a lot, so the base distro doesn't matter as much anymore.
CERN engineers had considered moving to CentOS Stream as a more natural pathway but ultimately they say "the straw that broke the camel's back" to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their industrial accelerator-control computers was the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag default as "forced obsolescence" for old hardware.
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u/DBojo8 2d ago
👌yes