A set of patches were posted today for review by the upstream Linux kernel developers in providing driver support for the Apple web camera and image signal processing (ISP) for Apple M-Series devices. This is enough to get the web camera support working on recent MacBooks while this code is now undergoing review for hopefully being mainlined in the Linux kernel.

Sasha Finkelstein sent out the patch series that was worked on with Eileen Yoon and Asahi Lina for enabling the Apple ISP and web camera support for M-series hardware. Sasha explained in the patch cover letter:

"This series adds support for the camera and ISP system present on Apple devices using M-series chips. This is a "simple" camera and does not need any special userspace handling, everything is handled by the firmware running on an ASC coprocessor."

This amounts to around six thousand lines of code for the Apple ISP media driver and DeviceTree files. As noted this web camera support does require Apple (closed-source) firmware support for doing much of the heavy lifting when it comes to the image processing.

[1]

For those interested [2]this patch series is now out for review and will hopefully be mainlined soon as the newest step forward for better Apple Silicon support with the mainline Linux kernel.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=apple_cam_lrg

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-pm/20250219-isp-v1-0-6d3e89b67c31@gmail.com/