Representatives of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) mentioned in their speech at the MiniDebConf conference plans to migrate more than 2,200 industrial and embedded computers used for managing the accelerator complex, which includes the Large Hadron Collider and several independent experimental setups, from RHEL to Debian 13 by the end of 2026. It is clarified that the migration will not affect the data centers and experimental systems, where RHEL/AlmaLinux will continue to be used.
Initially, CERN engineers planned to switch to CentOS Stream, but they abandoned this step due to the package build for the x86-64-v2 architecture ('-march=x86-64-v2'), which covers SSE3, SSE4_2, SSSE3, POPCNT, LAHF-SAHF, and CMPXCHG16B extensions, preventing the distribution from running on older hardware. Among the challenges faced during the implementation of Debian is the lack of full-fledged built-in tools for automated package building and publishing, as well as the absence of an official policy regarding binary kernel modules and issues with multi-version package management in a single repository.
In its time, CERN was one of the key developers of the Scientific Linux distribution, which was discontinued in 2019 in favor of CentOS. In 2022, after Red Hat changed its policy regarding CentOS support and prematurely discontinued support for CentOS 8, CERN adopted AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for supporting experiments, but continued using already deployed systems based on CentOS and RHEL until the end of the life cycle of the involved releases.
Source: opennet.ru
