AMD engineers today posted the second iteration of their AMD ISP4 Linux kernel driver, which is for supporting the web-camera with the high-end Strix Halo powered HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop and presumably many AMD Ryzen laptops in the future.
The AMD ISP4 driver is for handling the image signal processing (ISP) capabilities of the latest Ryzen SoCs interfacing with laptop web cameras for image scaling, image processing, and related work that can be offloaded from the CPU cores and onto this IP block.
This AMD ISP4 driver is just part of the multi-part effort for enabling the web camera support initially for the HP ZBook Ultra G1a as the first released Ryzen laptop but presumably other future Ryzen laptop models will be employing a similar design due to the power/efficiency benefits of going through the ISP hardware.
Right now that means out-of-the-box the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a doesn’t work with the upstream Linux kernel until the ISP4 driver and related patches land in the mainline kernel in the coming months… Hopefully it will be buttoned up around the end of the calendar year so that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and others will feature a nice out-of-the-box experience. In the interim the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS distribution with Canonical’s OEM kernel build contains the out-of-tree patches. More details on this web camera situation within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Linux review. Besides the web camera situation, it’s a wonderful Linux laptop with the incredible power provided by AMD Strix Halo with the likes of the Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 and Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 SoCs.
With today’s AMD ISP4 v2 Linux driver patches there is a fix for some media subsystem continuous integration (CI) test errors/warnings and some other minor code changes. The AMD ISP4 driver is passing all of the Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) compliance tests.
Those interested in this work on the AMD ISP4 Linux driver can find this LKML patch series for the latest code. Here’s to hoping all of the bits get tidied up and merged this year for helping the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and future AMD Linux laptops with their web camera support.
