CERN Leaves Red Hat for Debian After Two Decades on RHEL

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is known not only for the Large Hadron Collider but also for its long-standing allegiance to the Red Hat ecosystem. For many years CERN was a model “RHEL shop”: first, for about a decade, it ran its own RHEL-based distribution, Scientific Linux, which it also co-maintained with other scientific and educational institutions, and then in 2015 it switched to CentOS. And now, after another decade on CentOS, the organization is leaving the Red Hat path behind.

CERN unveiled the news at MiniDebConf, a conference held this past weekend in Winterthur, Switzerland.

What was the final straw

CERN's engineers had considered a move to CentOS Stream as the most logical continuation of their earlier course, but in the end they abandoned the idea. According to them, the “final straw” was the decision to make the compiler flag -march=x86-64-v2 the default — they saw it as a forced obsolescence of older hardware.

Not without hurdles

The move to Debian did not turn out to be trouble-free. Among the challenges of adapting, CERN cites the absence of standard tools for automatically building and publishing packages — by their assessment, the official toolset proved to have plenty of gaps. On top of that, some of the tools do not support the simultaneous coexistence of several versions of one and the same package.

Even so, the plans are ambitious: by the end of 2026, CERN intends to migrate all of its industrial and embedded systems to Debian 13 — and that means more than 2,200 computers.

Anyone wanting the details can watch the recording of the talk from MiniDebConf.

Source: Phoronix