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.