Good, I wonder how much money they’ve wasted over the years paying for RHEL.
CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
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Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#12> CERN engineers had considered moving to CentOS Stream as a more natural pathway but ultimately they say "the straw that broke the camel's back" to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their industrial accelerator-control computers was the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag default as "forced obsolescence" for old hardware. Incompatibility with x86-64-v2 means that CERN is running some older machines, over 15 years ol…
Is 15 years a lot?
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#13[dead]
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#14They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.
I had the exact same thought! One guy could maintain their OS. No forced compiler flags, internal binhost, everything else same as what they had.
There's even a thing called GRS (Gentoo Reference System) - a predefined Gentoo configuration that predictibly generates identical Gentoo installations. It's probably a chore to set up (that is, more than an ordinary Gentoo), but I expect it would make it very easy to maintain hundreds of installations based on that GRS.
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#15They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.
I believe NetBSD would be better for these machines. NetBSD supports old systems quite well and have a release cycle that in cases are longer than Debian.
But, CERN may have some proprietary applications on those systems that force them to use a specific setup which is hard to replicate in other distros.
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#16> CERN engineers had considered moving to CentOS Stream as a more natural pathway but ultimately they say "the straw that broke the camel's back" to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their industrial accelerator-control computers was the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag default as "forced obsolescence" for old hardware. Incompatibility with x86-64-v2 means that CERN is running some older machines, over 15 years ol…
Is 15 years a lot?
In computer terms it certainly is.
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#17Good, I wonder how much money they’ve wasted over the years paying for RHEL.
Eh? Didn't they come up with CentOS initially to not have to pay for RHEL?
I was ready irritated by the title but then again, phoronix has been a joke site for at least a few years.
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#18Good, I wonder how much money they’ve wasted over the years paying for RHEL.
They weren’t using RHEL. The title would be more accurate if it said “RHEL-based Linux”. They used their own build called Scientific Linux for a long time, then switch to CentOS. Then Oracle started aggressively poaching RedHat’s customers with Oracle Linux, which forced RedHat to start locking things down. One side-effect is that the life of CentOS 8 was dramatically shortened, and then RedHat killed the stable released versions of CentOS (9, 10, etc.). CentOS is now a rolling release “Stream” distribution, which nobody actually wants to use in production.
All this drama alienated many people who built their careers on RHEL-based systems, and created (either actual or perceived) instability in the RHEL ecosystem. And at the same time they started deprecating older hardware, some would say far too early. This is the “straw that broke the camel’s back”, as they said in the CERN presentation.
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#19They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.
I'm a Gentoo dev and work at CERN since a while. Of course I jokingly suggested that to my colleagues. I think it could actually work pretty well, though. Many physicists use Gentoo.
We run most things on Alma Linux, but there's also RedHat in the mix.
A good intersection of CERN and Gentoo is EESSI. They use CVMFS, which is a FUSE filesystem used for software distribution from CERN, and Gentoo as part of their software stack. See links below for more info:
Re: CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution
#20They could have used gentoo with their own binary package server. Maximum flexibility, including all compiler flags.
I believe NetBSD would be better for these machines. NetBSD supports old systems quite well and have a release cycle that in cases are longer than Debian. But , CERN may have some proprietary applications on those systems that force them to use a specific setup which is hard to replicate in other distros.
Most software at CERN is open source. But you are right, for things which are quite specific to CERN, like the control systems of the accelerator, there's also some proprietary code. Same for hardware actually, CERN develops open hardware too.