Re: Architecture baseline for Forky
Hi all,
On Mon, 27 Oct 2025, at 19:22, Colin Watson wrote:
> CERN spoke at DebConf [1] and indicated that ~47% of their accelerator
> control fleet runs x86-64-v1, which due to a cascading series of
> replacement costs meant that they estimated a budget of about €7M to
> migrate from CentOS 7 to CentOS Streams 9. As a result they chose to
> switch to Debian instead, and they said that their plan A was to use
> trixie and upgrade to forky in 2030. If I understood them correctly,
> they did say (in the Q&A) that there was a plan to upgrade to at least
> x86-64-v2 in the 2034 long shutdown, but that it was still a complex
> project with the possibility of being derailed by operational issues.
>
> Has anyone consulted with them about how this would affect their plans?
> They're a pretty significant organization and I know a lot of Debian
> developers would like to keep them being able to use Debian.
I am one of the presenters of said talk :) Thanks for the mention.
<CERN engineer hat on>
To give our perspective, as you mentioned correctly, we have numerous v1 machines that we'd love to upgrade by 2030, but it is very challenging. If this change is adopted for Forky it'll put a wrench in our "Plan A", which was to follow the Debian LTS release cycle and instead will have to freeze our infrastructure to Trixie until LS4 (2034). It'd also put a question mark into our choice of Debian as the distribution for our most heterogeneous class of systems. The change in RedHat was a bit surprising but as a "server-focused" OS we could justify why it was made. We then picked Debian in part because of its focus into compatibility with a wide range of systems, from x86 to embedded devices, only to be having the same discussion now.
</CERN engineer hat off>
<DM Hat on>
My opinion as a DM and Debian user is that this is a change that will have to be carefully evaluated, do we have any tests or benchmarks on what are the benefits, performance or otherwise? There have been many responses to this thread already outlining all of the arguments on both sides, so I will not repeat them here, but my opinion is that until now with every machine I picked up I would never question "can it run Linux/Debian?", it was always a given. Reading the arguments on both sides, I tend to agree on the fact that we should aim to support as many systems as possible as long as it is feasible. Then again, if something drastic happens like kernel upstream decides to drop support for these architecture versions, then it can be re-discussed. Required effort vs benefit and all that.
However, even the Debian website seems to have quite a few mentions to that effect as well[1].
" Windows 10 support ends in October 2025. Your computer may not run Windows 11, but it will run Debian for many more years without buying new hardware. Debian supports the End of 10 campaign."
"Debian has extensive Hardware Support.
Most hardware is supported by the Linux kernel which means that Debian will support it as well"
</DM Hat off>
I'll keep a keen eye on how this thread evolves. I'm open to hear any arguments for/against the above.
Cheers,
Nikos
[1] https://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian
--
BE-CSS-ISA
Accelerator Control Systems General System Administration
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