To Intel's credit ipu6 packs a ton a ton a ton of super advanced capabilities in. Having a good video pipeline is a huge edge. That it took a while for upstreaming to get really into gear on Linux does not super astound me. This feels like a place where we need to expect the open source world to have to find its purchase first before traction forward can really start.
This was a super shitty experience though. It really felt unplanned & chaotic. Hopefully some of the kernel architecture carved out for ipu6 is good & useful for running other video pipelines.
Most webcammers don't knowingly think heavily on color science, but ideally our devices can.
New-ish laptops with intel tiger lake procesors use MIPI cameras with ipu6 and don't work out of the box or only on specific kernel/distro combos.
There are efforts to mainline the driver and it is better than 2 years ago but still a big step backwards[1]
[1]https://github.com/intel/ipu6-drivers