It looks like with the Linux 7.2 kernel later in the year the AMD ISP4 driver will finally be merged to mainline. This driver is needed for the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Strix Halo laptop and other future AMD Ryzen laptops.
Over the past year AMD has been developing this new image signal processor driver and going with changes to AMDGPU and other drivers for a very nice, modern web camera experience on high-end AMD Ryzen laptops. So far it’s only been the HP ZBook Ultra G1a premium laptop to the ISP4 IP but moving forward it’s likely to see adoption by other laptops. The ZBook Ultra G1a is a fantastic and powerful Linux laptop with Ryzen AI Max+ PRO (sadly the review unit had to be sent back which is why there haven’t been any recent tests with fresh benchmarks), but the main limitation was the web camera not working on the mainline kernel. Ubuntu on its LTS releases has been carrying an OEM kernel with the out-of-tree patches and some users have manually been patching their systems, while that driver should finally be mainline with Linux 7.2.
Sakari Ailus with the Linux media subsystem commented today that after the AMD ISP4 went through ten rounds of patch review and revisions, the plan is to merge it for Linux 7.2. Sakari commented on the Linux kernel mailing list his plan for accepting it with Linux 7.2.
“The set is in my tree (amdisp4 branch) and I intend to send a PR for 7.2 once we have rc1 in the media tree (or whatever process we manage to get working by then).”
It’s too bad that it won’t make it for the imminent Linux 7.1 merge window, but at least now there is a clear path to mainline for this driver. At least by the time of Ubuntu 26.10 and other H2’2026 non-rolling Linux distributions that will mean out-of-the-box web camera support for those laptops making use of this IP. Unlike Intel’s recent IPU versions requiring closed-source user-space libraries otherwise falling back to CPU-based soft ISP, the AMD ISP4 approach doesn’t have this user-space binary blob limitation.
