CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution

CERN is migrating more than 2,200 industrial accelerator-control computers and embedded systems to Debian 13, targeting completion by the end of 2026. The switch follows a decade on CentOS after earlier use of Scientific Linux, driven by the “-march=x86-64-v2” compiler flag forcing obsolescence of older hardware. Data-center and experimental workloads will remain on RHEL/AlmaLinux.