The Ongoing Open-Source Work To Enable Webcam Support On Recent Intel Laptops

Webcamera support on recent generations of Intel laptops have tended to be a mess due to the Intel IPU6 requiring an out-of-tree kernel driver and a proprietary user-space component. But fortunately thanks to the work of Linar and Red Hat on a "SoftISP" implementation within libcamera, it's becoming possible to leverage these recent MIPI-based webcameras on an open-source software stack.

Hans de Goede of Red Hat and Bryan O'Donoghue of Linaro presented at the FOSDEM 2024 conference last weekend around their SoftISP work on enabling open-source use of MIPI-based web cameras. The situation was recently summed up in It's Becoming Possible To Use The Webcam On Newer Intel Laptops With Open-Source Linux for more background information on this web camera mess for Linux users.

For those wanting to learn more about this fully open-source software stack for MIPI webcams can see the video recording and slide deck over on the FOSDEM.org event page. Great presentation by Hans and Bryan for those interested in this topic, especially if you've been thinking about buying a newer laptop that may feature a MIPI-based camera.