I can remember from my mainframe days when IBM were absolute masters at support and stability. They took it to ridiculous extremes and wrote whole VM subsystems just to support user software from ancient systems.
One of the few things that I still appreciate in Ubuntu: the fact that LTS updates are provided for free to personal users.
To be honest I am not sure if CERN is making the right switch to Debian… Debian could easily drop support for x86-64-v1 like they did for x86…
Maybe investing 1 or 2 out of the 6 million they saved in a more conservative distro like Void or AntiX would be wiser?
I can see that point. Void supports a huge range of architectures, but not as many as NetBSD.
antiX is perhaps too innovative for CERN.
If they really want to escape from binary-mortality there is always Gentoo.
If Debian drops the older microarchitecture, Ubuntu does it too (actually sooner than Debian).
Anyway, the current Trixie (Debian 13) is going to be supported until 06.30.2030.
At that time the currently (probably) 19 years or so old computers will be 23 years old.
So I think they just got the necessary extra time to replace those dinosaurs.
The amount of money being poured into the cern project with a repayment date a long way in the future and the numbers of different countries involved they need something thats going to be around a long time with proven user base so with these in mind debian base of ubuntu is idéal, it talks the language.
IBM were control freaks back then, but I broke in with those in research lab environments, and they were amazing for their time. I still prefer computing today, minus the software.
At least some of those CERN computers would be doing real time logging of data. How well does Debian cope with real time applications?
Been reading thru this tread and did not understand what this v1, v2, v3 support meant. Been doing some reading and learn a little bit about it. Seem Debian and all distro based on Debian only ships with v1. So it does not matter if your PC supports v2 or v3, it will only run at the baseline of v1.
I have a newer laptop that supports v3 but because I run Mint I only get the performance of v1.
Yes, the only way you can the v3 performance is to compile everything … kernel and apps.
This is ridiculous, it undermines the whole idea of binary releases.
Does anyone have info on what sort of performance difference Howard would be looking at?
If the difference is small, the these hardware versions v1,v2,v3 are not really significant improvements.
Sun Microsystems were like that - rock solid support - if you had platinum support - you’d get an engineer onsite in 2 hours…
Then Oracle bought them out and it plummetted - didn’t just plummet it nosedived - one of the worst support sites / systems I’ve ever used… Red Hat walk all over them!
I agree - Ubuntu server is great! But my two main customers insist on RHEL… With both RHEL and Oracle - if you’re doing a manual install - it’s Gnome GUI installer - it’s horrible… Ubuntu’s “subiquity” TUI installer is vastly superior… Actually Debian’s “net install” is pretty good too (also TUI)… Who needs a GUI when the end goal is a headless server? I suspect that’s to help out Windows Server admins get their head around Linux…
I’d like to know what configuration management they use at CERN - Ansible? Chef? Puppet? 2000+ Linux servers without some kinda automation would require 20+ staff to admin them… I worked at BoM (Meteorology) in 2017 - they had thousands of Linux servers, and Linux desktops, and UNIX servers (AIX) and a Cray super-computer… They mostly used Puppet Enterprise (i.e. $$$ software)… You can do Puppet, Chef or Ansible for no-cost… I’ve never used Chef, but have use Puppet Enterprise, and “free” Ansible…
I dont know if all the CERN machines are servers. I think some at least might be embedded systems logging data from their particle accelerator. The CERN scientists probably have workstations.
They all require occasional management. At CSIRO I experimented with voluntary self management propped up with help support. It worked and it made everyone happy with the extra freedom.
Why would it be different to any other computer system or version
It seems Ubuntu also has v3 now. I use Gentoo where you can choose V3 (amongst other CPU details). I don’t know how much it has effect to the compiled code. There’s also binary packages with V3:
The title sais it:
CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian
So I imagine these computers are built in into some weird housings around/within particle accelerators. They aren’t usual computers with a display and keyboard and such.
More like industrial computers for controlling CNC machine tools.
I may be wron though, as I wasn’t there to know it for sure 
There are specialist real time OS’s … debian is not one of those.
There is a patch you can add to Debian to make it real-time-ish , but that does not make it the perfect real time OS.
And RHEL was like that before?
I am away on holiday but on my return I will try to get a reply from the guy who does conferences in our village and worked there to give me a reply that I can translate to give further details on it. But to be clear he is french and does tech speaches so may be difficult for me to do it all.
It is the same kernel patch in RHEL and Debian.
Reports say it is a halfway house compared to dedicated RTOS’s
I am only reporting what I read … you may have some direct experience with real time audio. All I have ever seen was data capture from laboratory machines using minicomputers years ago.
See if you can find out what the CERN computers are mainly used for.
I am surprised that they are able to use Linux … I thought they would have dedicated specialised software… real time data capture is tricky stuff.
That describes the vast bulk of all servers across the whole of the intertubes…
CERN basically invented the “internet” (or HTTP / web) internally when a NeXT (BSD based UNIX O/S) user at CERN posited HTML and HTTP : Tim Berners-Lee…
This is why “UNIX and Linux” : the things don’t need HID… It’s a “headless” server…
Yeah - most “real-time” systems didn’t use Linux - some had a look and feel like a UNIX like system… But those “real time” systems run on ancient tech… Intel deployed a MINIX “realtime” system into every Intel CPU for decades…
Most cars have a Linux subsystem sitting somewhere these days - Linux is fast enough these days to do realtime stuff… and nobody has to pay an arm and a leg to leverage something on the Linux kernel… Hence why Android uses it…