Michael Olbrich

Chromium has used V4L2 for cameras for many years and it works reasonably  well. Modern complex cameras are no longer a simple V4L2 device. libcamera  must be used instead. For Chromium in a Flatpak or Snap container it would  be nice to manage camera access at runtime. Or let's have some fun and use  an arbitrary video stream as a camera.

So the goal was to implement some kind of high-level camera interface. The  choice of technology was easy: xdg-desktop-portal is already used for  screen sharing and it has support for cameras as well. And PipeWire, the  media daemon that handles the camera already supports libcamera. 

I started the implementation more than a year ago and it is still ongoing.  This presentation gives an overview of the technologies involved, how it  fits all together and the story of the long and winding road to implement  this in Chromium.

The PTXdist build system recently had its 10th anniversary: time to look at the state of the project and the new features which have recently been developed by the community. The highlights of the last year are a new image generation mechanism, improved systemd support, running on OS X, the split up of runtime and build time dependencies, the start of SELinux support and of course a lot of package version bumps and cross build patch mainlining all over the place.

The spectrum of hardware ptxdist is able to cover is demonstrated with BSPs on quadcore Cortex-A9 with 1 GHz+ and on Cortex-M3 with 48 MHz.

This talk is for developers who need to integrate Embedded Linux systems, as well as for developers working on other cross build systems.