1802117 - Intel MIPI IPU6 webcam (Alder Lake) not working in Firefox, works in Chromium (Ubuntu 22.04)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: WebRTC: Audio/Video, defect, P4)

Description

[Aaron Whitehouse]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:107.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/107.0

Steps to reproduce:

Start a Google Meet or visit https://webcamtests.com/ on Ubuntu 22.04 using the default install of Firefox (snap).

I am using the packages from https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/oem-solutions-group/intel-ipu6/ubuntu/ to make the webcam work, as it is not supported out of the box on Ubuntu 22.04.

Actual results:

The Intel MIPI webcam is detected, but does not work. In the Google Meet it says "Camera failed".

I believe that this did originally work for me in Firefox, after installing the packages from the above PPA, but then stopped working at some point. I had assumed that the third-party drivers were at fault and have been using a UVC webcam -- then I was forced to use Chromium for a website and noticed it was using the integrated webcam and it was working.

I see someone else complaining about this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/ywf3s7/intel_mipi_camera_works_with_all_applications/

Expected results:

The camera should work as it does in Chromium.

Please let me know if there is any further information that would be helpful.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox Build System::General' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Alex Hochheiden [:ahochheiden] (needinfo? me)]

I'm not entirely sure where this belongs, so I'll put it back to Untriaged.

Comment 3

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

I could not reproduce this issue on my Ubuntu 20.04 machine with a Microsoft camera - I tried on Firefox 107 and on the Latest Nightly 109.0a1 - the webcam is properly working in my case.

Moving this to Firefox Build System -> Third Party Packaging, if this is not the right component, please move to a more appropriate one.
Thanks!

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:gerard-majax, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 5

[:gerard-majax]

I suspect there's some sandboxing limitation here. However, I have no such hardware to test. As much as I can tell, chromium is not snapped, so it is expected to work differently.

Could you share journalctl -xe content when reproducing the failure?

Comment 6

[:gerard-majax]

Amin, do you know of existing limitations around supporting those webcams? As much as I remember they require some more / different kernel and userspace, could we be missing some slots/plugs or libs in the snap?

Comment 7

[Amin Bandali [:bandali]]

I'm not aware of any existing limitations with those webcams, but we did get a similar bug report for the chromium snap recently, though for a different webcam make and model.

For folks running into this issue, please try checking for apparmor="DENIED" in the journal to see if there are any relevant entries, which could hint at either a missing interface plug for the snap package or perhaps a missing apparmor rule for an existing interface.

Also, FWIW, chromium seems to have also been a snap on Ubuntu, since bionic (20.04).

Comment 8

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:gerard-majax, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 9

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Hello,

I have tested this further and I do not think it is snap related. I have tested with the Firefox deb (using the instructions from https://fosspost.org/how-to-install-firefox-as-a-deb-package-on-ubuntu-22-04/ to install from the Mozilla PPA) and the webcam still does not work.

I will attach the output of journalctl -x for both the snap and the deb versions of Firefox for the time periods when I launched Firefox, visited webcamtests.com and tried to use the webcam (it failed in both cases, whereas this site works on the same machine in Chromium).

Comment 10

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Attachment: The output of journalctl -x for the Firefox snap when the webcam fails on webcamtests.com

Comment 11

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Attachment: The output of journalctl -x for the Firefox deb when the webcam fails on webcamtests.com

Comment 12

[Aritra Biswas]

I am also affected by this bug.

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/110.0
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
Firefox & Chromium both installed as snap

This is on a Dell XPS 9320 (13 Plus), and it looks like Aaron's machine is a XPS 9315. I have the Intel MIPI Camera working in Chromium through an additional driver: "Using HAL library for MIPI camera through Intel IPU6 from libcamhal-ipu6ep0 (open source)" is selected in "Additional Drivers" in Ubuntu. Note the webcam also doesn't work in Cheese, but works in Chromium-based browsers.

Comment 13

[Aritra Biswas]

I was able to get this working through a workaround! Found a solution digging through this thread of Arch Linux users trying to implement this driver on that distro.

This answer fully details the workaround and also identifies the root cause - the video format used with this camera is unsupported, so the workaround uses v4l2-relayd to convert video to a supported format.

Comment 14

[Aritra Biswas]

(In reply to Aritra Biswas from comment #13)

I was able to get this working through a workaround! Found a solution digging through this thread of Arch Linux users trying to implement this driver on that distro.

This answer fully details the workaround and also identifies the root cause - the video format used with this camera is unsupported, so the workaround uses v4l2-relayd to convert video to a supported format.

Correct link to workaround comment: https://github.com/stefanpartheym/archlinux-ipu6-webcam/issues/1#issuecomment-1370005030

Comment 15

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

This has been merged recently upstream in libwebrtc: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/webrtc/issues/detail?id=14650, and we'll pick it up next time we update (a matter of months).

Thanks for posting the workaround, I've put this in the right component so the webrtc folks (that take care of camera) are aware of this.

Comment 16

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

added via the recent 110 libwebrtc update.