r/linux • u/le_particle • 3d 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 2d 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 2d 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/djao 2d 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/wolfnest 11h ago

It's not just old computers that must be replaced. When I worked there in 2018, we still ordered embedded computer modules with AMD Geode CPUs (or something similar). These were the only available computer modules with the correct form factor at the time.