Got one step closer to making my laptop builtin camera working.

Laptop is Dell Precision 5690. Camera is a PCI ipu6 device:

$ lspci -knn -s 0000:00:05.0
0000:00:05.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Intel Corporation Meteor Lake IPU [8086:7d19] (rev 04)
Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0cc8]
Kernel driver in use: intel-ipu6
Kernel modules: intel_ipu6
It seems that the kernel-level support is there. One driver was not enabled by default, so I asked to enable it. For now I include the extra driver as a dkms package: https://bugs.debian.org/1132201

Now I manage to get picture (non-optimal quality) from qcam. I also get the same picture from cheese and from gst-launch-1.0 pipewiresrc ! autovideosink .

Next step was to get browsers to use the camera. At first, both firefox (packages firefox-esr and the mozilla copy) and packages chromium refused to use it. It turned out that there were at least two issues:

Portal permissions issue: I had the following:
$ flatpak permissions devices camera
Table Object App Permissions Data
devices camera no 0x00
Removed that line using: flatpak permission-remove devices camera

(Nothing runs from flatpak. flatpak was a convenient tool at the time of writing the article below to handle those permissions. Anything better today?)

And of course, I had to enable in firefox's about:config media.webrtc.camera.allow-pipewire (and restart firefox). Otherwise I saw a long list of "ipu6" devices (all the /dev/videoN files?) instead of a single camera named "Built-in Front Camera".

I had help from, among others, https://jgrulich.cz/2024/12/13/when-your-webcam-doesnt-work-solving-firefox-and-pipewire-issues/ on getting libcamera to work with browsers.

The quality could be improved, but my laptop's camera is finally usable.

#ipu6 #libcamera #pipewire #DellPrecision #IntelIPU6