JACoW is a publisher in Geneva, Switzerland that publishes the proceedings of accelerator conferences held around the world by an international collaboration of editors.
@inproceedings{radeva:icalepcs2023-thpdp064,
author = {A. Radeva and J.M.E. Elyn and F. Locci and T. Oulevey and M. Vanden Eynden},
title = {{Selecting a Linux Operating System for CERN Accelerator Controls}},
% booktitle = {Proc. ICALEPCS'23},
booktitle = {Proc. 19th Int. Conf. Accel. Large Exp. Phys. Control Syst. (ICALEPCS'23)},
eventdate = {2023-10-09/2023-10-13},
pages = {1475--1479},
paper = {THPDP064},
language = {english},
keywords = {controls, Linux, software, operation, hardware},
venue = {Cape Town, South Africa},
series = {International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems},
number = {19},
publisher = {JACoW Publishing, Geneva, Switzerland},
month = {02},
year = {2024},
issn = {2226-0358},
isbn = {978-3-95450-238-7},
doi = {10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-THPDP064},
url = {https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/thpdp064.pdf},
abstract = {{Changing the operating system (OS) for large heterogeneous infrastructures in the research domain is complex. It requires great effort to prepare, migrate and validate the common generic components, followed by the specific corner cases. The trigger to change OS mainly comes from Industry and is based on multiple factors, such as OS end-of-life and the associated lack of security updates, as well as hardware end-of-life and incompatibilities between new hardware and old OS. At the time of writing, the CERN Accelerator Controls computing infrastructure consists of ~4000 heterogeneous systems (servers, consoles and front-ends) running CentOS 7. The effort to move to CentOS 7 was launched in 2014 and deployed operationally 2 years later. In 2022, a project was launched to select and prepare the next Linux OS for Controls servers and consoles. This paper describes the strategy behind the OS choice, and the challenges to be overcome in order to switch to it within the next 2 years, whilst respecting the operational accelerator schedule and factoring in the global hardware procurement delays. Details will be provided on the technical solutions implemented by the System Administration team to facilitate this process. In parallel, whilst embarking on moving away from running Controls services on dedicated bare metal platforms towards containerization and orchestration, an open question is whether the OS of choice, RHEL9, is the most suitable for the near future and if not what are the alternatives?}},
}