Fairphone 6 wide camera experimental Linux support

Summary

Experimental Linux support for the Fairphone 6 wide camera Published 21 Jul 2026 Fairphone 6 ultra-wide working in GNOME Snapshot. Background The Fairphone 6 is an interesting target for mainline Linux and postmarketOS for a few reasons: It has relatively modern hardware compared with most other supported postmarketOS devices. Fairphone invests in mainline Linux support, with Luca Weiss driving much of the development. Those efforts have already provided promising initial support for the hardware. Fairphone deliberately allows alternative operating systems. Fairphone aims to support its devices for a long time, so the phone could provide a stable base for future work. There are still two main blockers to making the device generally usable: onboard audio and camera support. I am working on a project that needs QR scanning, so I used that as an opportunity to see whether I could get at least one camera working. Disclaimer: I heavily relied on LLM assistance to make this work. Fairphone 6 cameras The Fairphone 6 has three cameras: Rear: Sony IMX896 Front: Samsung S5KKD1 Wide: OmniVision OV13B10 The Sony and Samsung sensors have no mainline Linux drivers, but the OmniVision OV13B10 has a mainline driver. The ultra-wide camera is sufficient for QR scanning. A phone camera is not a single device. On Qualcomm SoCs, the capture path is a chain: image sensor → CSI-2 D-PHY → CSIPHY → CSID → ISP (VFE/TFE) → memory (I2C) (MIPI lanes) (decode) (demux) (write engine) (DMA) There are also several supporting components, including a camera clock controller (camcc), the CCI (Qualcomm's dedicated camera I2C controller), power rails, and a VCM (voice-coil motor) for autofocus. The downstream vendor Android kernel drives all of this with Qualcomm's substantial, proprietary CAMX/cam-kernel stack. On mainline, the equivalent is the much smaller qcom-camss driver, with libcamera providing userspace integration and image processing. To get the OmniVision camera working, I had to teach qcom-...