It's Becoming Possible To Use The Webcam On Newer Intel Laptops With Open-Source Linux

While Intel typically does a great job with their open-source Linux hardware support with enabling all features under Linux and doing so in a timely manner -- often well in advance of the client and server hardware availability -- an exception in recent years has been around the web cam support for many newer Intel laptops. Since Alder Lake an increasing number of Intel-powered laptops have been relying on a raw MIPI camera sensor connected to the IPU6 IP. Intel has been tightly controlling the intellectual property around IPU6 so in turn their Linux support has consisted of an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But thanks to Linaro and Red Hat, an open-source alternative has been forming.

This isn't a new problem and if you're a devoted Phoronix reader you'll likely recall a number of articles on the topic the past several years. Upstream Linux kernel developers back in 2022 even recommended avoiding newer Intel laptops for Linux use due to the webcam support being a long ways out. There's been some progress on improving the situation but it's been a long past 2+ years if wanting to make use of the webcamera support without relying on Intel's out-of-tree kernel driver and closed-source user-space bits.

Hans de Goede with Red Hat has been working on this problem along with engineers at Linaro for coming up with a software image signal processing (ISP) solution that will work without any proprietary bits. It's becoming possible to use the web cameras on open-source software via the ov2740 kernel driver improvements in the upstream kernel, Intel for their part has been working on upstreaming some IPU6 code, and there is a open-source software ISP stack being developed within the libcamera project. Hans recently posted a v2 patch series for the libcamera software ISP code. There's also been other related work such as improving the Firefox PipeWire camera support.

Hans de Goede will be talking more about this in-progress work on open-source webcam support for recent Intel laptops next week at FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels. Via his blog he's posted an overview of the work for those interested.

Intel's official out-of-tree Linux driver support for IPU6 can be found via GitHub for those interested. The blog post also details how Fedora users can employ a COPR repository to get a working open-source driver stack right now.