One Of Ubuntu's Great Features Has Been Broken For One Month

One of the great niche features of Ubuntu Linux has been the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA that's been maintained by Canonical for providing daily kernel builds of the Linux Git kernel state as well as of all point releases and release candidates. Sadly it's now been broken for one month for this very convenient feature.

While most Ubuntu users are content with running the default kernel build shipped by Ubuntu each cycle, the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA has been a straight-forward way for many years now to be able to obtain a mainline kernel build as Debian packages. Thus allowing to quickly and easily fetch the mainline Git state or newer stable releases than what is otherwise provided. It's great for those wanting to try out newer kernel versions, an easy way to test the latest upstream to see if a kernel bug is fixed or reproducible there, etc, rather than going through the time building your own kernel. It's one of the features I have loved about Ubuntu for saving time when wanting to quickly try out a new kernel version and making it easy for others to grab the kernel builds as well to reproduce or otherwise analyze.

Sadly, the daily kernel builds ceased on 14 October and haven't resumed. The stable kernel point releases and release candidate builds also ceased at the same point... Thus no Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA builds like Linux 6.6 stable or the newly-christened Linux 6.7-rc1. For a few days last month the PPA page was 404'ing while at least now it's back to serving prior Debian packages but still without any updates.

Hopefully kernel.ubuntu.com/mainline will be resumed by Canonical and not become another relic as it's a mighty handy feature and something that isn't easily provided by other Linux distributions.