Fedora's RPM Fusion Adds Experimental Intel IPU6 Web Camera Support

The Intel IPU6 web camera tech found in Alder Lake laptops and newer has unfortunately no upstream Linux driver yet and has resulted in kernel developers avoiding these laptops where web camera support is needed. Intel maintains an out-of-tree IPU6 Linux driver while they have been making progress toward ultimately getting it upstreamed. To ease the situation for Fedora Linux users, an experimental IPU6 software stack has now been added to the RPM Fusion repository.

The IPU6 camera tech with the latest Intel laptops has been a mess for Linux although in recent months there has been progress on getting it cleaned up and getting the necessary bits into order for upstream Linux kernel support. Progress is being made while for those with an Intel Alder Lake or Raptor Lake laptop with an IPU6 web camera, Fedora's RPM Fusion repository is now providing an initial software stack. This is nice to see since with Intel's own out-of-tree driver support it has been catered just toward particular Ubuntu Linux releases.

Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been working on this Fedora IPU6 camera support and can be simply installed via DNF if having the RPM Fusion free and non-free repositories enabled.

This camera stack has been tested on the Dell Latitude 9420, Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10, Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 2, and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 laptops. The packaging work includes an IPU6 kernel module, the closed-source set of user-space camera libraries, a GStreamer plug-in that can interface with the libraries, and V4L2 loopback/relayd support for software not interfacing with GStreamer directly but instead using V4L2.

More details on this experimental Intel IPU6 support for Fedora users via RPM Fusion can be found via this blog post by Hans de Goede.