Ubuntu OEM Archives

What are OEM Archives?

As part of the collaboration between Canonical and OEMs public OEM archives exist that ship additional open-source patches, fixes and hardware-specific documentation. These archives are used by default on the Ubuntu pre-installed SKUs as sold by OEMs. The updates in those repositories are sensitive in timing by OEMs and Canonical, to match hardware release cycles and thus are performed outside of the SRU process.

The OEM archives are public and are visible at http://oem.archive.canonical.com/dists/ . Furthermore, a few Canonical Teams got granted access to observe the private staging PPAs from which the above Archives are constructed. This includes a few Canonical TechBoard members, that now have further visibility into pre-release / pre-public publication of the updates that land in the OEM archives.

These OEM archives are currently made available for 20.04/22.04 LTS only.

P.S. http://*.archive.canonical.com/ are all mapped to the same server.

Out-of-the-box experience

OEM meta-packages

To provide a better experience on vanilla Ubuntu installations, stub OEM meta-packages with Modaliases metadata have been made available in the Ubuntu Archive. These stub meta-packages pull in OEM signing key as a trusted key, and enable the correct OEM repository matching the hardware in question. Usually, it involves switching machines from linux-generic to the linux-oem kernel flavour - both kernel flavors are maintained in the public Ubuntu Archive by Canonical Kernel Team. This allows users of vanilla installations to opt-into OEM updates, fixes, firmware updates, and documentation to be installed after the next apt full-upgrade. Such a solution is very transparent, as one can disable the OEM repository and uninstall the OEM vendor meta package from the GUI software-properties app & ubuntu-drivers CLI tools.

It is worth noting that as the only focus of the OEM experience is currently 20.04/22.04 LTS, the aforementioned meta-packages are only made available via focal/jammy release and focal-updates/jammy-updates.

Since special handling is needed to ensure swift enablement of new certified hardware, there are a few standing exceptions approved for the OEM meta-packages:

• Handling SRUs for meta-packages: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates/OEMMeta

• Standing MIR for promotion to main on package accept: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MIRTeam/Exceptions/OEM

Upload rights management

Ubuntu OEM meta packages

Besides regular Ubuntu core developers, OEM package uploads are controlled by the canonical-oem-metapackages packageset. This packageset is generated and refreshed automatically by the oem-meta-packageset-sync script, running periodically on snakefruit. The contents of the packageset are determined by scanning the OEM metapackage staging PPA. The owning team of this PPA is the packageset Canonical OEM Metapackage uploaders team and is governed by the Ubuntu Developer Membership Board.

This setup allows OEM developers to swiftly introduce new packages without having to look for sponsorship from MOTU or core-developers, which would otherwise be a bottleneck with many new certified devices appearing.

Applying for the Canonical OEM Metapackage uploaders team requires following usual DMB per-packageset upload rights (PPU) application process, in this case for the canonical-oem-metapackages packageset.

OEM archive

Steps forward

TODO