I am looking into installing Linux on a test XServe machine and see how it goes overall. We have our entire infrastructure on OSX and would like to move to Linux servers.
Is there any distribution which has good support for XServe? Google search yielded nothing conclusive. I don't mind hacking around for personal use (compiling kernel, tweaking packages and configurations) but when running in production it's good to be cautious.
Paying for commercial support is definitely an option.
I spent countless hours trying to get to run
to run on an XServe, but most attempts failed miserably. While I managed to get some distributions to run with a lot of tricks I wouldn't want to use on a production system, even those had diverse problems due to not entirely supported hardware. All in all, this was a thoroughly frustrating and disappointing experience.
In the end, I decided to use the free VMWare ESXi 5, which suppports our XServes, and run Linux on virtual machines, which I would have likely done anyway with KVM as base. This took about 20 minutes :)
I have an Xserve 2009 EFI and was able to install both CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 16.04 without issue. Both installs worked without modification so this issue has been solved in the latest distributions.
According to this post it should be able to run Debian. I havent' tried yet though http://staff.blog.ui.ac.id/jp/2011/08/25/installing-debian-squeeze-on-xserve-3-1/