libcamera Celebrates Its First Release As Camera Support Library For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: libcamera Celebrates Its First Release As Camera Support Library For Linux

Libcamera has been in development for several years now as an open-source camera support library that works across Linux, Android, and Chrome OS platforms. Due to interest from seeing tagged releases, the libcamera crew has published their first official release of this open-source camera stack...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/libcamera-First-Release

[NathanSamson]

so anyone working on "helping out modern Intel laptops otherwise stuck to proprietary web camera software stacks," for libcamera? Or is it just theory for now?

[treba]

This is great news. "Normal" apps that just want to benefit from the broader device support provided by this library can do so by using pipewire/xdg-portals, assuming pipewire uses libcamera as backend. Which should become the default now IIUC. The combo of libcamera, pipewire and xdg-portals means better/easier APIs for app devs, better device support, multiple apps can use one camera at the same time and proper app permissions/sandboxing for Flatpak etc. Awesome to see things coming together!

[stan]

open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP

In other words, this framework makes the kernel even more blob-friendly and its GPL license even more like swiss cheese. Haven't we had enough BS (blob stuff) from NVIDIA, WinModems, DisplayLink, Broadcom wifi, and Intel Software Defined Silicon already?

[oleid]

open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP

In other words, this framework makes the kernel even more blob-friendly

Isn't libcamera working entirely in userspace? I.e. there are no device specific kernel drivers needed.

[Quackdoc]

I kind of doubt it will, but I hope this leads to more neat camera projects

[archkde]

open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP

In other words, this framework makes the kernel even more blob-friendly and its GPL license even more like swiss cheese. Haven't we had enough BS (blob stuff) from NVIDIA, WinModems, DisplayLink, Broadcom wifi, and Intel Software Defined Silicon already?

I have no idea how anything is supposed to be more blob-friendly than "[having] traditionally been implemented in a dedicated MCU in the camera".

[hotaru]

I have no idea how anything is supposed to be more blob-friendly than "[having] traditionally been implemented in a dedicated MCU in the camera".

I don't think oleid was questioning the "blob-friendly" part, but rather the "makes the kernel" part. libcamera is a userspace library and doesn't make the kernel anything.

[Zoll]

Up until last week, the library was crashing on me.

[pinchartl]

so anyone working on "helping out modern Intel laptops otherwise stuck to proprietary web camera software stacks," for libcamera? Or is it just theory for now?

Still quite theoretical at the moment. There will be a non-negligible amount of work needed in libcamera, but before we start that, we need kernel drivers with a documented API. Intel has published out-of-tree drivers for the IPU6, but they pass ISP parameters through an undocumented binary blob. Until that gets solved, we won't be able to progress.