JACoW is a publisher in Geneva, Switzerland that publishes the proceedings of accelerator conferences held around the world by an international collaboration of editors.
TY - CONF AU - Radeva, A. AU - Elyn, J.M.E. AU - Locci, F. AU - Oulevey, T. AU - Vanden Eynden, M. ED - Schaa, Volker RW ED - Götz, Andy ED - Venter, Johan ED - White, Karen ED - Robichon, Marie ED - Rowland, Vivienne TI - Selecting a Linux Operating System for CERN Accelerator Controls J2 - Proc. of ICALEPCS2023, Cape Town, South Africa, 09-13 October 2023 CY - Cape Town, South Africa T2 - International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems T3 - 19 LA - english AB - 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? PB - JACoW Publishing CP - Geneva, Switzerland SP - 1475 EP - 1479 KW - controls KW - Linux KW - software KW - operation KW - hardware DA - 2024/02 PY - 2024 SN - 2226-0358 SN - 978-3-95450-238-7 DO - doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-THPDP064 UR - https://jacow.org/icalepcs2023/papers/thpdp064.pdf ER -