Ubuntu's Great Mainline Kernel PPA Hasn't Been Working Since Mid-September

[osw89]

I find it hard to believe that anything open source can possibly be broken.

More likely it is user error, I don't know what's so hard about RTFM.

"Something negative that's related to open source? An excellent opportunity to fellate my corporate masters for free." Pathetic as always.

[eitch]

I have been building mainline stable kernels for Ubuntu LTS for personal purposes, but if someone wants to give them a try, have at it:

https://castour.net/linux/amd64/

I have generic, lowlatency and real time builds which I typically do within 24 hours of a new version being tagged. Since I build on Ubuntu LTS w/the default gcc, dynamic modules built w/dkms compile without issue.

Disclamer: I am not a kernel developer, I cannot debug any issues you might encounter. But I do dogfood them on my personal system for about a year now. YMMV

How do you build it, do you also have a script?

[drwilliams]

How do you build it, do you also have a script?

No script, but I am using ghk's stable branch repo:

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git

I then do the following commands (for example, based on current kernel):

cp /boot/config-6.11.5-drw-lowlatency .config
make olddefconfig && make menuconfig
(selecting the appropriate General Setup -> Premption Model version)
make -j 33 deb-pkg LOCALVERSION=-drw-[generic|lowlatency|realtime]

That produces 3 *.deb packages which you can install.

For the realtime kernel I first apply the appropriate RT patch from:

https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/rt/

And then copy the config, etc.

Hope that helps!

[drwilliams]

I build on a 16 core processor with SMT, so that is why I use '-j 33'. Adjust as needed for your build system...

[muncrief]

Ubuntu was the first distro I used as my primary desktop, finally abandoning Windows with the release of Windows 8. I quickly gravitated to Xubuntu as Gnome began to become too convoluted for my taste, and when I tried KDE I found it had begun the same journey.

But after about 4 years I found two primary problems with Ubuntu - the first was that I always had to reinstall when major versions were released, the upgrade process simply never worked. The second was that if I wanted to use new software, which was often critical or important, I had to use PPAs which were hit or miss, and despite the hard work of most devs could suddenly stop working completely or become unstable.

So though I'd heard of the problems with rolling distros I finally decided to try Arch when I needed to run some new QEMU/KVM software that simply wouldn't work on Ubuntu.

Of course installing Arch at that time was completely raw, and unusually difficult. But after a few months I discovered that running Arch presented far fewer problems than Ubuntu. I switched to CachyOS awhile ago primarily for its integrated OpenZFS support, with the extra benefit of optimized packages, but it's still primarily Arch.

Of course these distros are not without their own problems, in fact I have to locally build libpamac-aur right now because of some problem with the centrally built one, but this is a minor issue compared to the endless difficulties with Ubuntu, and regular reinstall with new releases.

However there is one area where Ubuntu shines - if there are third party packages for Linux it will at least be a .deb and .rpm. But things are changing, as in the beginning most all third party Arch packages had to installed from the AUR, and security there has the same vulnerabilities as PPAs. But since the launch of the Steam Deck I'm finding more and more native Arch packages.

So if you find yourself frustrated by Ubuntu I'd give Arch or CachyOS a try. They aren't as difficult to install as they were before, in fact CachyOS is quite easy, and you may find as I did that rolling distros are less problematic than so called "stable" ones.

[drwilliams]

Ubuntu was the first distro I used as my primary desktop, finally abandoning Windows with the release of Windows 8. I quickly gravitated to Xubuntu as Gnome began to become too convoluted for my taste, and when I tried KDE I found it had begun the same journey.

But after about 4 years I found two primary problems with Ubuntu - the first was that I always had to reinstall when major versions were released, the upgrade process simply never worked. The second was that if I wanted to use new software, which was often critical or important, I had to use PPAs which were hit or miss, and despite the hard work of most devs could suddenly stop working completely or become unstable.

So though I'd heard of the problems with rolling distros I finally decided to try Arch when I needed to run some new QEMU/KVM software that simply wouldn't work on Ubuntu.

Of course installing Arch at that time was completely raw, and unusually difficult. But after a few months I discovered that running Arch presented far fewer problems than Ubuntu. I switched to CachyOS awhile ago primarily for its integrated OpenZFS support, with the extra benefit of optimized packages, but it's still primarily Arch.

Of course these distros are not without their own problems, in fact I have to locally build libpamac-aur right now because of some problem with the centrally built one, but this is a minor issue compared to the endless difficulties with Ubuntu, and regular reinstall with new releases.

However there is one area where Ubuntu shines - if there are third party packages for Linux it will at least be a .deb and .rpm. But things are changing, as in the beginning most all third party Arch packages had to installed from the AUR, and security there has the same vulnerabilities as PPAs. But since the launch of the Steam Deck I'm finding more and more native Arch packages.

So if you find yourself frustrated by Ubuntu I'd give Arch or CachyOS a try. They aren't as difficult to install as they were before, in fact CachyOS is quite easy, and you may find as I did that rolling distros are less problematic than so called "stable" ones.

Yeah, version upgrades used to suck. But as long as you don't go crazy with 3rd party PPA/packages, upgrading to the newest version should not be a problem. However....

My experience has been to not upgrade on day one. Wait a week, or more, to ensure the upgrade process is as smooth as possible,

[royce]

I have been building mainline stable kernels for Ubuntu LTS for personal purposes, but if someone wants to give them a try, have at it:

https://castour.net/linux/amd64/

I have generic, lowlatency and real time builds which I typically do within 24 hours of a new version being tagged. Since I build on Ubuntu LTS w/the default gcc, dynamic modules built w/dkms compile without issue.

Disclamer: I am not a kernel developer, I cannot debug any issues you might encounter. But I do dogfood them on my personal system for about a year now. YMMV

Do you build ZFS into the kernel by any chance?

[Yalok]

But after about 4 years I found two primary problems with Ubuntu - the first was that I always had to reinstall when major versions were released, the upgrade process simply never worked. The second was that if I wanted to use new software, which was often critical or important, I had to use PPAs which were hit or miss, and despite the hard work of most devs could suddenly stop working completely or become unstable.

Strange, I've been Ubuntu user since 6.06 and have done dozens of release upgrades for my machines, as well as desktops and servers at work. Always with lots of PPAs on my machines. It was never the case for me that I had to reinstall for upgrade reasons, the release upgrades always worked out just fine.

[drwilliams]

Do you build ZFS into the kernel by any chance?

No, not right now for 2 reasons:

1. ZFS support as far as I know trails current stable kernel versions.
2. I don't use ZFS personally, so don't feel comfortable offering something I could not test/verify.

Sorry!

[agartner]

Personally I use the zabbly linux kernel builds: https://github.com/zabbly/linux

There are also zfs packages published for those kernels: https://github.com/zabbly/zfs