Reverse-engineered Linux driver for the Broadcom 1570 PCIe webcam | Hacker News Reader

Reverse-engineered Linux driver for the Broadcom 1570 PCIe webcam

github.com

73 pointsai_ja_nai23 comments

I doubt the actual name of the product is a "Broadcom 1570"; 1570 is just the PCI device ID. Compared to other webcams this does seem a rather hairy beast - looking through the source, it appears to have its own DDR controller that needs to be calibrated, and requires firmware loaded upon initialisation for it to work. Very different from the USB UVC webcams that are "set and forget" from the perspective of the host.

The project owner also considers the Retina driver. Nice. (See the issue tracker.) But is it illegal?

Why would it not be legal?

(Come on HN, downvoted for asking questions?)

Apple has rather draconian anti-reverse engineering fine prints in most of their eula.

Breaking an EULA isn't breaking the law.

In many parts of the world reverse-engineering for the sake of interoperability is legally defended right, and any such clauses of the EULA are void.

An EULA is a license agreement - a contract of sorts. Breaking a contract you agreed on is punishable in court under the right circumstances, but it's not "illegal" (otherwise, you could literally make up new laws). EU courts often find EULAs unenforceable due to a host of reasons (we're very consumer-friendly over here).

Furthermore, you are only breaking the contract if you accepted the contract in the first place; so it only covers what you can do with the product iff you purchased the product (and accepted the EULA that comes with it). So if you are doing blackbox reverse engineering, there is nothing the company can do to prevent you from figuring out how their physical product works.

Finally, as another comment noted, in most parts of the world reverse engineering for interoperability purposes is protected by law.

Because shiple :)

EULA is toilet paper in EU.

How well does Linux works on a MacBook air these days? I have a mid-2013 one and thinking completely making the switch to Linux.

I can only speak for myself personally, but I tried Ubuntu, Mint, and Arch, and they were all horribly glitchy (especially the graphics) and had awful battery life. I've been watching this project for a while, but I'm not sure that webcam support could be enough to make up for the other issues.

I'm using Ubuntu on my 2014 rMBP and its not glitchy in the slightest .. in fact, its delightful!

The Air should be pretty decent as it has Intel graphics. Hopefully you also got one with Intel WiFi. You can just get a Live USB and try it out for yourself.

Last I heard Torvalds was running Linux on an MBA so I imagine it can't be horrible.

Yeah, but he's a Master Builder :-)

I've been running Fedora on a mid-2013 MBA (i7-4650U) since April last year, and I love it. I grew up on RedHat, switched to Ubuntu around 2010, but after Unity I've switched back to the other camp, and Fedora has been really stable for me.

I used this as a guide to get the install going: http://mattoncloud.org/2014/02/05/fedora-20-on-a-macbook-air...

Although, I don't use the custom packages, because most things worked out of the box. The only thing I have to do manually is update the display backlight driver after every kernel upgrade, but I do updates once a month, and it's a simple "make;make install" and an extra reboot.

I gave OS X a shot for about 2 years, but could never quite get used to some of the quirks.

Fedora on this MBA has been super stable.

I had some issues with the usb bus triggering the system to wake form suspend on fedora22 but it was easy enough to fix .. and random HDPI issues but nothing to bad

As far as I know there's at least two problems with the latest retina MBP - the webcam driver and the new force touchpad driver (introduced in 2015). Looking on the forums I saw someone saying he can't make the touchpad to work.

I just got one of these. If you install kernel 4.2 (currently a release candidate) the keyboard and trackpad work great. The backlights and other things you would expect to be broken work too. What doesn't work is the webcam, light sensor, suspend/hibernate, bluetooth, and hotplugging thunderbolt devices. It does everything I need for work though.

thanks for the details! i bet it's possible to fix most the things by following along arch wiki. but I'm happy to know the trackpad is working.

Everything works but the webcam.

Unfortunately I had to do some unsavory things like disabling NCQ and write barriers to prevent errors and extreme slowness with disk operations. This was a couple months ago so maybe the issues have since been fixed.

I was using CentOS 7 and whole installation process is described here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GlMtdLLYgoTFs1ZNWsYU4SBf...

Not a 'Apple FaceTime Driver'. Its a Linux driver for the build-in Broadcom 1570 PCIe webcam (Macbooks mid 2013 and later).

We updated the submitted title, which was “Building Apple FaceTime Driver for Linux”.

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