r/linux • u/le_particle • 1d ago
Discussion Part of Cern to debian
Maybe I missed such a discussion here but, Cern used to be a very large "customer" of rhel/rhel-derivatives, and even had created/curated scientific linux for a while. Now though that the rhel/rhel-derivatives need x86-64-v2 to run, a lot of older hardware are becoming obsolete.
ENTER DEBIAN.
Do you believe that now that such an organization is going to use debian, things will change and become more professional/industry standard?
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u/MelioraXI 1d ago
Do you believe that now that such an organization is going to use debian, things will change and become more professional/industry standard?
Not sure what you mean, Debian is a big player on the server side, not every server is running RHEL.
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u/le_particle 1d ago
It is indeed but large organizations and companies turn to rhel/rhel derivatives because of support and being more of the golden standard(at least on the education/research area)
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u/MelioraXI 1d ago
SLA and low downtime is critical for operations, so yes RH definitely push hard on that. Or companies who uses their tooling like Openshift, Quarkus etc etc.
Until Debian can offer something similar it going to be a fragmented market in the enterprise scene. Debian is still going to be used widely and orgs and larger enterprises will use RH for mentioned reasons.
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u/djao 1d ago
Ironically, CERN is being forced to switch away from RHEL on their embedded hardware because of a lack of support from RHEL. The computers running CERN's detectors are buried 100 meters underground. Replacing the hardware would be a 5 billion dollar project (miles long tunnels of vacuum chambers would have to be shut down, etc.). Alas, that hardware was installed before 2008 (the LHC was constructed from 1999 to 2008), and it happens to run x86-64-v2, which RHEL no longer supports. CERN literally can't run RHEL on this hardware, because RHEL doesn't support the hardware.
I think RedHat just doesn't care about these customer corner cases where the customer can't upgrade 20-year-old hardware for whatever reason. The market is too small to justify the engineering expense.
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u/Robsteady 1d ago
No. RHEL is a corporate entity. Debian is a community "project". They serve different purposes and the CERN example is a very good example of the differences.
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u/XLBilly 1d ago
Companies like suppliers for lots of reasons.
If an org didn’t want or more often ‘need’ Red Hat as a supplier they could have always been using centos / stream distros.
Most companies also don’t run production equipment on incredibly out of date hardware.
My personal Xeon E5 from 2012 can run RHEL10.. that’s e waste in industry.
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u/le_particle 1d ago
Its e waste, but thinking the fact of legacy stuff these organizations still need it makes some sense to keep using them. Its nice that the linux ecosystem giving the choice
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u/BigRedS 1d ago
I can't think what I expect to change as a result of this - CERN's a bit of an outlier with fairly niche and specific needs, I don't think they are a trend-setter in any meaningful way.
I don't want Debian to change, I don't expect RH to change, I don't think enterprise will find a new favourite distro. Ubuntu's already pretty popular anyway.
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u/le_particle 1d ago
I guess a lot more people will focus on debian stuff, because you have a lot of dev/systems engineers on cern. Cern is indeed an outlier but considering how many scientists have ties there
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u/orev 1d ago
CERN is not influential in IT because of the number scientists they have. They were influential in the Linux space because they had resources to make Scientific Linux, and others could benefit from it for free, and for a RedHat ecosystem it was a big deal. If they're not using RedHat derivatives, their influence will be less.
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u/ABotelho23 1d ago
Debian is already an industry standard. I doubt CERN adopting them is gonna change much.
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u/le_particle 1d ago
Depends on what you mean industry standard!! Much of the internet could be running on debian, but if you go on specific software most companies build on rhel(unfortunately)
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u/natermer 10h ago
From what I gather they just joined their efforts into Almalinux once CentOS was dropped by Redhat in favor of CentOS stream.
In other words "Scientific Linux" is now just Almalinux.
The exception being for old systems as you noted.
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u/spongybobie 1d ago
I dont know the cern internal dynamics. But working with similar organizations they would not directly use debian. It can be something built on a modified debian base. Sure.
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u/ilep 1d ago edited 1d ago
It might say more about budget savings than anything else. There are not that large differences with distributions these days.
Edit: so the move is only for specific parts where hardware is for industrial purpose with a long lifetime. It does not cover everything, far from it.
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u/Robsteady 1d ago
rhel/rhel-derivatives need x86-64-v2 to run, a lot of older hardware are becoming obsolete
No, it's not a budget consideration, it's an actual technical hurdle.
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u/spazturtle 15h ago
I wish we would stop using corpo language.
The hardware used to run a particle accelerator is not obsolete just because a distro wants to stop supporting it.
Obsolete means something is no longer useful, these computers and CPUs are still perfectly functional and useful.
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u/Robsteady 15h ago
That's the whole point though... they're switching those devices to Debian because they aren't obsolete by Debian's standards. It's cheaper to spend the time replacing the OS on them than replacing and retooling that part of their system.
Hell, I bet a lot of these systems don't have to connect to the internet themselves anyway, so staying on an unsupported release isn't as big a deal as a random user's desktop.
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u/DFS_0019287 1d ago
Note that CERN is only moving to Debian for their embedded hardware. They're still using RHEL or derivatives for their standard scientific computing.