[Cc: folks from IPU6 external driver, IPU3 maintainers, Dell, Lenovo, Chromium, Canonical/Ubuntu, Red Hat] Dear Greg, I am writing you, because I remember you – at least – were active several years ago in getting good upstream driver support into the Linux kernel. It looks like the driver for the MIPI IPU6 camera of Intel Alder Lake based laptops, for example, Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and Dell XPS 13 9315/9320, is not in the upstream Linux kernel. With Ubuntu’s OEM image pre-installed by Dell, and on Google Chromebooks the camera is supposedly working [1]. There is a GitHub project with a repository for the Linux kernel patches [2], but the patches – as expected, and known from other external drivers, and Android drivers – do not build against all Linux kernel versions [3]. A request to upstream the drivers was opened at the end of March [4], and got the reply below in July: > Intel is not ready yet to provide technical support to various Linux > distro and all OEM devices at this moment with Intel IPU6 github. > > Intel is supporting Dell laptop and their MIPI camera functionality > on Ubuntu with release/integration support from Canonical. If you are > using Dell devices, please refer to the devices listed in this link. > (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Dell) You can learn the latest updates from > the installation guide. The patches were integrated into ChromiumOS’ Linux kernel tree – for specific version, like 5.15 [5], and the same for Ubuntu 22.04 with Linux 5.15 – only in June [6]. A lot of that (redundant) work seems to be done by the Intel developers involved also in the GitHub project. In the last seven or so years Linux upstream driver support worked well for me – especially with Intel hardware –, so I wanted to make you (and others) aware of the situation, and hope, that you could do something about the situation. With the current situation I can only recommend to FLOSS users to *not* buy these devices. Kind regards, Paul PS: The proprietary firmware is also not in the linux-firmware repository [7], and the user space packages [8] are also not packaged yet for some distributions like Debian. PPS: VA-API support also does not work [9]. [1]: https://ubuntu.com/certified/202203-30070 [2]: https://github.com/intel/ipu6-drivers [3]: https://github.com/intel/ipu6-drivers/issues/13 [4]: https://github.com/intel/ipu6-drivers/issues/22 [5]: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/third_party/kernel/+/3034663 [6]: https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-kernel/ubuntu/+source/linux/+git/jammy/log/drivers/media/pci/intel [7]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-firmware/+bug/1955383 [8]: https://launchpad.net/~oem-solutions-group/+archive/ubuntu/intel-ipu6/+packages [9]: https://github.com/intel/media-driver/issues/1371