Overnight Intel upstreamed their IPU7 firmware binaries into the linux-firmware.git repository where Linux distributions will then be able to pick them up for easy consumption. IPU7 is for their latest Image Processing Unit for some web cameras on their latest-generation Lunar Lake platform.

Since Intel [1]IPU6 for the image processing unit IP connected to some MIPI web cameras the Linux driver situation has been a mess. After a few years of work by developers from Intel, Red Hat, and others, the IPU6 web camera support is getting into shape while the IPU7 support is still to be tackled upstream. Intel has been maintaining IPU7 driver support via GitHub with the driver able to be built out-of-tree / as a DKMS module. To work on the process of getting all the IPU7 support mainlined, at least now the IPU7 firmware binaries have made it into the centralized linux-firmware.git repository.

The Intel IPU7 firmware binaries were upstreamed via [2]this commit .

There are two variants of the IPU7 with the plain vanilla build used by current gen Lunar Lake platforms and then IPU7PTL as the variant for upcoming Panther Lake laptops.

Those interested in Intel's IPU7 Linux driver support right now can find it via [3]the ipu7-drivers on GitHub while hopefully all of the bits will manage to be upstreamed soon.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/IPU6

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/commit/?id=62960e12efffbc25226ed8d7976716cd237fd744

[3] https://github.com/intel/ipu7-drivers