CERN Renounces RHEL in Favor of Debian(www.infoq.com)
20 pointsby hilux3 hours ago1 comment
  • nwmcsween2 hours ago
    Is there a reason almalinux or rockylinux wasn't used? I would except CERN to want first class Selinux support no?
    • ocdan hour ago
      I often think of Debian as a bit moldy from some changes over the years with legacy support (kludges?) in place, where it seemed more like an outdated Arch Linux at some point once it had switched to systemd.

      But if I were CERN, I understand the choice of not getting involved with newer forks that aren't novel distributions you can trust to be around for the long haul. I would choose Debian as well in their place.

    • winstonwinston18 minutes ago
      Alma and Rocky both require x86-64-v2 CPU as a minimum (same as RHEL 9). CERN want baseline x86-64-v1 which Debian provides.
    • jonathanspwan hour ago
      This is a dumb and inaccurate headline.
    • burnt-resistor2 hours ago
      Well, those are functional clones of RHEL/CentOS and unsuitable for CERN as mentioned in the article.
      • KAMSPioneeran hour ago
        Best I can tell the article only decries the deprecation of x86-64-v2 in RHEL, and says that for that reason Alma is not a viable solution...

        Buuuut here is the fix: http://mirror.grid.uchicago.edu/pub/linux/alma/10.2/isos/x86... There's you Alma installer with support for the processors they use, and you can even install EPEL packages built for x86-64-v2 on Alma as well!

        So...I agree with the user above, what stops what I must imagine would be a simpler switch from RHEL to Alma instead of Debian?

    • secabeenan hour ago
      RHEL is EOLing CPU architectures that CERN still relies on heavily.

      > RHEL 9 mandated x86-64-v2, requiring instruction sets like SSE4.2 and POPCNT, while RHEL 10 targets x86-64-v3. CERN's accelerator infrastructure manages more than 2,200 specialised front-end computers and 17,000 embedded devices, including legacy Core 2-era and custom industrial boards, engineered for 10- to 15-year lifecycles aligned with long-term accelerator shutdown windows. Upstream microarchitecture mandates threatened to abruptly obsolete thousands of functional, purpose-built control nodes.