YHK - yet another hacker news clone

CERN Renounces RHEL in Favor of Debian

16 points hilux 2 hours ago 8 comments

nwmcsween 1 hour ago | parent

Is there a reason almalinux or rockylinux wasn't used? I would except CERN to want first class Selinux support no?

burnt-resistor 1 hour ago | parent

Well, those are functional clones of RHEL/CentOS and unsuitable for CERN as mentioned in the article.

KAMSPioneer 8 minutes ago | parent

Best I can tell the article only decries the deprecation of x86-64-v2 in RHEL, and says that for that reason Alma is not a viable solution...

Buuuut here is the fix: http://mirror.grid.uchicago.edu/pub/linux/alma/10.2/isos/x86... There's you Alma installer with support for the processors they use, and you can even install EPEL packages built for x86-64-v2 on Alma as well!

So...I agree with the user above, what stops what I must imagine would be a simpler switch from RHEL to Alma instead of Debian?

secabeen 51 minutes ago | parent

RHEL is EOLing CPU architectures that CERN still relies on heavily.

> RHEL 9 mandated x86-64-v2, requiring instruction sets like SSE4.2 and POPCNT, while RHEL 10 targets x86-64-v3. CERN's accelerator infrastructure manages more than 2,200 specialised front-end computers and 17,000 embedded devices, including legacy Core 2-era and custom industrial boards, engineered for 10- to 15-year lifecycles aligned with long-term accelerator shutdown windows. Upstream microarchitecture mandates threatened to abruptly obsolete thousands of functional, purpose-built control nodes.

KAMSPioneer 14 minutes ago | parent

Okay, but Alma rebuilds with x86-64-v2 as a separate ISO, and they even build EPEL packages with support for it: https://almalinux.org/blog/2025-06-26-epel-v2-now-covers-alm...

So the original commenter's questions stands IMO: why is Alma not considered a solution?

m000 3 minutes ago | parent

Nobody was ever fired for choosing Debian.

jonathanspw 40 minutes ago | parent

This is a dumb and inaccurate headline.

ocd 40 minutes ago | parent

I often think of Debian as a bit moldy from some changes over the years with legacy support (kludges?) in place, where it seemed more like an outdated Arch Linux at some point once it had switched to systemd.

But if I were CERN, I understand the choice of not getting involved with newer forks that aren't novel distributions you can trust to be around for the long haul. I would choose Debian as well in their place.