CERN Moves Thousands of Accelerator Control Computers to Debian

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Prompted by CentOS 8's premature demise, it's a very visible loss for the Red Hat ecosystem:

CERN is moving several thousand computers that control its particle accelerator hardware from Red Hat-family Linux distros to Debian.

CERN - the place that runs the Large Hadron Collider - generates a lot of data, and that means it uses a lot of computers. Most of them run Linux, and for over 20 years, it used distros in the Red Hat family. Now, that's beginning to change: it's moving what it calls the "front end" computers, the ones underground that control the LHC, over to Debian Linux.

At the end of last month, the MiniDebConf Winterthur 2026 was held in Switzerland, and two CERN engineers, Federico Vaga and Nikos Tsipinakis, gave a talk about Controlling CERN's Accelerators with Debian. In a dense 40 minutes, they talked about the size and complexity of CERN's computer systems and the many problems with moving some of them from the Red Hat family over to Debian.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research - whose CERN acronym comes from the French name of its predecessor, Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire - is one of the world's most high-tech research organizations. It's where the World Wide Web was invented, and CERN has also long been a major user of Red Hat-family Linux.

For many years, CERN and Fermilab - its equivalent in the USA - jointly maintained their own RHELative, called Scientific Linux. This started in 2004, and its first mention on The Register was in 2007. For some years, Scientific Linux was one of the leading free RHELatives... until 2014, when Red Hat brought CentOS in-house. CERN's job is doing physics, not maintaining a Linux distro, so once CentOS became official, CERN switched to it - starting with its own build of CentOS 7.

You can probably already guess where this story is going. With hindsight, that wasn't a great move.

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