MacBook Pro Facetime HD Camera

Message

kwright · Post by **kwright** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 8:25 pm

I've seen conflicting posts about whether or not there's a driver in the kernel available for a MacBook Pro Facetime HD camera...some users report it's working on linux, and some do not. I cannot find anything specifically citing Gentoo as a working or non-working distro against the hardware. Further, the Gentoo wiki article on the MacBook doesn't directly speak about the built in camera (at least that I saw).

Does anyone happen to know if it's supported and/or the installlation/configuration method for it?

s0be · Post by **s0be** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 10:54 pm

That depends on which MacBook Pro Facetime HD Camera...

If it's one of the USB ones, odds are 'fairly high' that it will either work out of the box, or with USB IDs added to the correct driver.

If it's the pci-e one (in newer models), there's not yet a working driver. Here's the 'ongoing work':

https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie

kwright · Post by **kwright** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 8:48 pm

Very disappointing to see there's no driver from Broadcom for this hardware. You'd think they'd be willing to release it considering it's already in a unix-based platform.

That said the current work exposes a means to extract the firmware from OSX in order to use in linux...

Assuming that works and the firmware gets loaded appropriately will the camera work using another available driver? I'm somewhat familiar with the firmware loading mechanisms from Gentoo, but I thought there also had to be a driver present, and since there is none available what good does the firmware do?

Thanks.