Webcameras on newer Intel laptops have been challenging for Linux use without resorting to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space components, but that's been thankfully changing with progress being made on an open-source stack. There's still proprietary firmware necessary for enabling the IPU6 image processing unit, but at least that too is now in linux-firmware.git for easy distribution and packaging by Linux distributions.

It's becoming possible to use the IPU6-based webcams on newer Intel laptops with open-source driver support thanks to the work by Red Hat and others. See that linked article for more details on the recent work in this area with this webcam issue becoming more prevalent since Intel Alder Lake laptops.

The news today is that the Intel IPU6 firmware binaries have made it into linux-firmware.git, the centralized place for all of the possible (and redistributable) Linux firmware binaries in use by the kernel drivers.

This commit that landed a few hours ago adds in the IPU6 firmware binaries used by Tiger Lake, Jasper Lake. Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and Meteor Lake laptops.

In total it's 2.25MB worth of firmware binaries posted for the Intel IPU6 IP.