European Wafaa

Alex announced earlier today that version 0.11.1 of the r5u870 webcam driver. It is currently building in the Build Service drivers:webcam repo. For those that are interested here is the Release Notes:

- Use constant naming of 'Disabled' for no powerline setting.
- Added missing IOCTL query for Night Mode paramter. (thanks to TJ for
these two)
- No kernel log spew about ioctl.
- Limited support for 1812 and 1841 cameras - these may require the use
of the 'uvcvideo' kernel module for communication, and r5u870 for
uploading of microcode. These apparently work correctly after a
warmboot.
- Project infrastructure has now been provided - for example, a bug
tracker and mailing lists.
- Resulting image on some VCC4 cameras appeared reversed. This was
because the camera is installed in reverse in the laptop. Enable
H-Flip by default only on the subset of models that have it installed
incorrectly.
- Support for building on late 2.6.25 kernels and upwards (tested on
2.6.26-rc5 prior to release).
- Fixed firmware for some Pavilion laptops.

Some known issues:

- 1803 webcam is unsupported (we have the firmware, however). This
should be implemented before the next release. (issue16)
- 1812 and 1841 webcams need to be properly sorted out. (issue1 and
issue3)
- If you're running webcam software, suspend, and resume with the
software still running, you may oops the device driver. (issue13)
- VIDIOCCAPTURE is not handled (issue5)

He also added a little piece which was quite good timing considering we were talking about Lord K-H's kernel talk at Google on Friday:

Now that this release is out, I'm also going to attempt to see if I can get this merged upstream with the V4L guys. Stay tuned for updates.

So what does that mean? Well in a nutshell, he's hoping to get the r5u870 accepted upstream into the kernel so you will be able to get things working without any additional kernel modules etc !!!