3 ms·

I'm not sure what your point is. It may also get sorted quickly. There are already projects going on to write the needed drivers, like libcamera.

vetinari 4y ago
Depending on your definition of "sorted". For the foreseeable future, it is going to require proprietary libraries (userspace ones, not just firmware blobs). Until that changes, it won't be supported OOB on any distro.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  The libcamera project is already a free userspace library supporting the IPU and exposing the relevant bits to applications. I still don't get why people say that there's nothing on the horizon.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Because it still depends on the closed source libraries: > Does this mean the camera stack is completely open? > libcamera is open-source friendly which means all of libcamera itself is open source. libcamera uses a plugin system for Image Processing Algorithms (IPA) which are built as dynamically-linked shared objects, and are loaded at run-time. Open-source modules are identified based on digital signatures, while closed-source modules are isolated inside a Sandbox environment with restricted access to the system, reducing the impact of untrusted binary blobs. I.e. libcamera needs ipu6-camera-hal (which is open-source, apache licensed) which in turn depends on ipu6-camera-bins (which is binary-only, closed source).
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    Because I bought my first IPU device in 2016. libcamera has been "in the horizon" before then. I'd bet that most laptops bought today will be obsolete by the time their webcams work.
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  Does it still require an out of tree kernel module? Because I just can't with that shit.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Yes; but that's the smaller problem. In order to use the camera, you need to have a bunch of closed-source libraries (ipu6-camera-bins).
stncls 4y ago
It's a legitimate question but in this case my personal conclusion is that GP is right, convenient MIPI camera support is not coming for another 2-3 years. The problem is that this generation of Intel platforms have migrated to a completely different approach to the handling of webcams. Previously, the webcams modules were intelligent black-boxes that transparently handled things like auto-focus and auto-exposure in their firmware. They presented themselves as just a framebuffer with a handful of tunable knobs. The v4l2 subsystem was a perfect fit for this approach. Now with MIPI, things are very different. The OS must actively participate in tasks like autofocus (not rocket science, but not trivial either), be it by providing code that runs on the camera module, or by actively running algorithms on the CPU. No such thing exists right now, but as you pointed out, a few user-space projects are working on it. The big hurdle is the OS-level API. There is no successor for v4l2 yet, and kernel devs are still in the design phase. They recon it will take 1-2 years just to stabilize a reasonably general API [1]. There are proposals, but they are still controversial at the moment. I dug into the issue because I considered buying this very laptop. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YvnybHVFmpUJs4qi@kroah.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YvnybHVFmpUJs4qi@kroah.com/
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  This situation is so fucked and I am basically ruling out Intel as an option for my new mobile workstation because of it.

vetinari 4y ago

Depending on your definition of "sorted". For the foreseeable future, it is going to require proprietary libraries (userspace ones, not just firmware blobs). Until that changes, it won't be supported OOB on any distro.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
The libcamera project is already a free userspace library supporting the IPU and exposing the relevant bits to applications. I still don't get why people say that there's nothing on the horizon.
- vetinari 4y ago
  Because it still depends on the closed source libraries: > Does this mean the camera stack is completely open? > libcamera is open-source friendly which means all of libcamera itself is open source. libcamera uses a plugin system for Image Processing Algorithms (IPA) which are built as dynamically-linked shared objects, and are loaded at run-time. Open-source modules are identified based on digital signatures, while closed-source modules are isolated inside a Sandbox environment with restricted access to the system, reducing the impact of untrusted binary blobs. I.e. libcamera needs ipu6-camera-hal (which is open-source, apache licensed) which in turn depends on ipu6-camera-bins (which is binary-only, closed source).
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  Because I bought my first IPU device in 2016. libcamera has been "in the horizon" before then. I'd bet that most laptops bought today will be obsolete by the time their webcams work.
CameronNemo 4y ago
Does it still require an out of tree kernel module? Because I just can't with that shit.
- vetinari 4y ago
  Yes; but that's the smaller problem. In order to use the camera, you need to have a bunch of closed-source libraries (ipu6-camera-bins).

stncls 4y ago

It's a legitimate question but in this case my personal conclusion is that GP is right, convenient MIPI camera support is not coming for another 2-3 years. The problem is that this generation of Intel platforms have migrated to a completely different approach to the handling of webcams. Previously, the webcams modules were intelligent black-boxes that transparently handled things like auto-focus and auto-exposure in their firmware. They presented themselves as just a framebuffer with a handful of tunable knobs. The v4l2 subsystem was a perfect fit for this approach. Now with MIPI, things are very different. The OS must actively participate in tasks like autofocus (not rocket science, but not trivial either), be it by providing code that runs on the camera module, or by actively running algorithms on the CPU. No such thing exists right now, but as you pointed out, a few user-space projects are working on it. The big hurdle is the OS-level API. There is no successor for v4l2 yet, and kernel devs are still in the design phase. They recon it will take 1-2 years just to stabilize a reasonably general API [1]. There are proposals, but they are still controversial at the moment. I dug into the issue because I considered buying this very laptop. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YvnybHVFmpUJs4qi@kroah.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YvnybHVFmpUJs4qi@kroah.com/

CameronNemo 4y ago
This situation is so fucked and I am basically ruling out Intel as an option for my new mobile workstation because of it.