Expanding Web Camera Support Among Newer Intel Laptops Planned For Fedora 42

Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede wrote a blog post a few days ago around the Intel IPU6 and newer web camera support still being a challenge on Linux. While various Intel IPU6 open-source code has been upstreamed, there remain differences with a number of laptops currently available still not working out-of-the-box for web camera support on Linux. Hans de Goede has now initiated a change proposal for Fedora 42 to take care of more Intel web camera issues.

Hans de Goede initiated a Fedora 42 change proposal to work on more x86 MIPI camera hardware enablement for getting more of these web cameras in modern Intel laptops working:

“The initial IPU6 camera support landed in Fedora 41 only works on a limited set of laptops.

The reason for this is that with MIPI cameras every different sensor and glue-chip like IO-expanders needs to be supported separately.

This change is about the ongoing work to get the camera working on more laptop models.
…
Currently on many new laptop models the camera does not work OOTB in Fedora, the goal of this change is to get the camera to work OOTB on more laptop models.”

For the Fedora 42 release this spring, the hope is that more of the needed changes to the Linux kernel and libcamera will all be squared away for allowing more Intel laptop web cameras to be working out-of-the-box on Fedora Linux.

More details for those interested via this change proposal. The change still needs to be approved by FESCo but given it’s a straight-forward change by a Red Hat employee, it’s a pretty safe bet to proceed.