Reverse-engineered Linux driver for the Broadcom 1570 PCIe webcam

https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie

by ai_ja_nai • 11 years ago

73 23 11 years ago

github.com

NaNaN• 11 years ago

The project owner also considers the Retina driver. Nice. (See the issue tracker.) But is it illegal?

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

Why would it not be legal?

(Come on HN, downvoted for asking questions?)

breul99• 11 years ago

Apple has rather draconian anti-reverse engineering fine prints in most of their eula.

OldSchoolPro• 11 years ago

Because shiple :)

rasz_pl• 11 years ago

EULA is toilet paper in EU.

Gys• 11 years ago

Not a 'Apple FaceTime Driver'. Its a Linux driver for the build-in Broadcom 1570 PCIe webcam (Macbooks mid 2013 and later).

sctb• 11 years ago

We updated the submitted title, which was “Building Apple FaceTime Driver for Linux”.

Scarbutt• 11 years ago

How well does Linux works on a MacBook air these days? I have a mid-2013 one and thinking completely making the switch to Linux.

ChristianBundy• 11 years ago

I can only speak for myself personally, but I tried Ubuntu, Mint, and Arch, and they were all horribly glitchy (especially the graphics) and had awful battery life. I've been watching this project for a while, but I'm not sure that webcam support could be enough to make up for the other issues.

fit2rule• 11 years ago

I'm using Ubuntu on my 2014 rMBP and its not glitchy in the slightest .. in fact, its delightful!

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

The Air should be pretty decent as it has Intel graphics. Hopefully you also got one with Intel WiFi. You can just get a Live USB and try it out for yourself.

zxcvcxz• 11 years ago

Last I heard Torvalds was running Linux on an MBA so I imagine it can't be horrible.

jotm• 11 years ago

Yeah, but he's a Master Builder :-)

openstack_guru1• 11 years ago

I've been running Fedora on a mid-2013 MBA (i7-4650U) since April last year, and I love it. I grew up on RedHat, switched to Ubuntu around 2010, but after Unity I've switched back to the other camp, and Fedora has been really stable for me.

I used this as a guide to get the install going: http://mattoncloud.org/2014/02/05/fedora-20-on-a-macbook-air...

Although, I don't use the custom packages, because most things worked out of the box. The only thing I have to do manually is update the display backlight driver after every kernel upgrade, but I do updates once a month, and it's a simple "make;make install" and an extra reboot.

I gave OS X a shot for about 2 years, but could never quite get used to some of the quirks.

Fedora on this MBA has been super stable.

user1234666• 11 years ago

I had some issues with the usb bus triggering the system to wake form suspend on fedora22 but it was easy enough to fix .. and random HDPI issues but nothing to bad

m1keil2• 11 years ago

As far as I know there's at least two problems with the latest retina MBP - the webcam driver and the new force touchpad driver (introduced in 2015). Looking on the forums I saw someone saying he can't make the touchpad to work.

thescriptkiddie• 11 years ago

I just got one of these. If you install kernel 4.2 (currently a release candidate) the keyboard and trackpad work great. The backlights and other things you would expect to be broken work too. What doesn't work is the webcam, light sensor, suspend/hibernate, bluetooth, and hotplugging thunderbolt devices. It does everything I need for work though.

cbetz• 11 years ago

Everything works but the webcam.

Unfortunately I had to do some unsavory things like disabling NCQ and write barriers to prevent errors and extreme slowness with disk operations. This was a couple months ago so maybe the issues have since been fixed.

I was using CentOS 7 and whole installation process is described here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GlMtdLLYgoTFs1ZNWsYU4SBf...

userbinator• 11 years ago

I doubt the actual name of the product is a "Broadcom 1570"; 1570 is just the PCI device ID. Compared to other webcams this does seem a rather hairy beast - looking through the source, it appears to have its own DDR controller that needs to be calibrated, and requires firmware loaded upon initialisation for it to work. Very different from the USB UVC webcams that are "set and forget" from the perspective of the host.

Reverse-engineered Linux driver for the Broadcom 1570 PCIe webcam

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