Re: video(4) landed. "No webcam driver" is dead.

From: Céleste_Ornato <celeste.ornato1_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:48:26 UTC
Possibly the funniest driver announcement I've seen to this day, quite
an important driver too.  Great work !

"Abdelkader Boudih" <freebsd@seuros.com> writes:

> For years, the go-to move for dodging a video call was "well, I run FreeBSD, and there's no webcam driver, so." 
>
> Camera stays off, nobody questions it, everyone assumes a serious systems person and not someone
> hiding from a standup. That excuse is now retired.
> By Adrian Chadd, Baptiste Daroussin, and me.
> We did this. On purpose. I don't know what we were thinking.
>
> video(4) is a new kernel-side capture framework:
> a common device model for things that produce frames, instead of every capture driver reinventing /dev/videoN from scratch.
>
>  Initial consumers:
>  • uvideo(4): USB Video Class webcams, converted onto the new framework. Most of the hard logic here
> was already done for us - OpenBSD's Robert Nagy and Marcus Glocker wrote the original driver years
> ago, Baptiste ported it to FreeBSD.
>  • fwcam(4): Apple firewire camera. work perfectly for me, but Australian mode (upside down) for Adrian.
> Where its been tested: 
>  • across basically the whole Apple fleet here : MacBooks, iMacs, Every one of those machines is now
> missing exactly one thing (WiFi, still catching up on some chipsets).
>  • Also tested on regular Laptops with integrated webcams, which mostly just worked .
> Diffs for the design: D58367-D58369 
>
> What's coming next:
>  • PCI capture cards - the "I have a real capture card, not a webcam".
>  • SBC-class cameras (think Raspberry Pi camera modules) - CSI-ish targets, for anyone doing embedded/SBC work on FreeBSD
> I'd love it if you:
>  • Threw a UVC device at uvideo(4) that has those non generic cameras. (especially 2k, 4k, thermal cameras, ect).
>  • Have an firewire webcam
> *Once a few more hackers have tested this, I will post it to freebsd-current@.*
>
> As for meetings: the next generation of excuse is already in production. "Sorry, can't turn my
> camera on, I'm running TempleOS this week, it's between me and God." Untestable &
> Unfalsifiable. Nobody's going to ask follow-up questions. You're welcome.
>
> *Sent from HolyC Internet Missionary.*