Camera support has traditionally been a pain point when it comes to
Linux phones.
Years and years of competition on the photography capabilities of
consumer devices have pushed vendors to adopt more and more custom,
closed source implementations, leaving users of free software powered mobile
devices with nothing but poor solutions limited to work on the single
devices they have been developed for.
With the increasing maturation of libcamera, a complete user space
camera stack for Linux devices is now finally available, and Linux
phones developers can now cooperate on more mature camera solutions
for their devices.
The BoF will serve for phone developers and camera developers as a
cooperation space, to better understand their mutual needs and move
forward camera support for the whole Linux ecosystem.
Cameras have traditionally been a distinguishing factor in the
traditional mobile/smartphone market. Year after year the number of
pixels available in a phone's camera have become a stable part of the
phone producers marketing material and as a direct consequence of such
fierce competition everything around cameras has usually been quite
secretive, with vendors implementing rather cumbersome software
architectures to work around the software licensing requirements which
would have otherwise required them to open at least part of what they
consider their secret sauces.
Vendor's reluctance to discuss and innovate in a common shared space
and the undeniable deficiencies (or better, the complete lack of
existence) of anything resembling a camera stack in the Linux
ecosystem has pushed camera support to a quite uncomfortable position
when it comes to FOSS-powered mobile devices. Until very recently nothing
comparable to what could be achieved by a rather cheap Android phone,
running binary blobs both in user and kernel space, can be easily
realized by using a fully open infrastructure.
Three years after starting of the libcamera project,
its adoption as the default camera stack for the Raspberry Pi
ecosystem and its increasing permeation in the x86 device space thanks to
the support of vendors like ChromeOS and a more robust integration in Pipewire,
it's now time to finally address the camera issue in the FOSS phone space.
With the recent interest from Librem5 and Pinephone communities in the
project, this BoF intends to provide a space where phone developers,
libcamera developers and hopefully vendors can discuss their mutual
headaches and try to sketch a way forward in order to provide to
free-software equipped mobile device a camera support that can do more than what
an Android phone was capable of 10+ years ago.