Webcam support is coming, and it will work out of the box, but unless you installed recently (August 22 or later), you will have limited image quality since you’ll be missing certain calibration files.
If you want to get full webcam quality when the update hits, you’ll have to do some manual hacking. First boot into macOS and copy the /usr/sbin/appleh13camerad file out (you can use a USB drive, the cloud, or your EFI system partition if you know what you’re doing).
Then boot into Linux, and do this:
mkdir /tmp/firmware
cd /tmp/firmware
mv /path/to/appleh13camerad .
sudo tar xzf /boot/efi/asahi/all_firmware.tar.gz
sudo tar czf /boot/efi/asahi/all_firmware.tar.gz .
sudo asahi-fwupdate
That’s it! When webcam support hits, you’ll have a full quality image. This will also work if you do it after the update, of course.
People who installed after August 22 (both Arch and Fedora) do not need to do anything, as that file will already be available.
Perhaps you could consider having a mechanism (a script displaying a notification or similar) to inform affected users. It would seem a bit of a shame if people unknowningly got stuck with lower quality webcam feeds if they were to miss this particular post. This could be used to inform about other firmware potentially needed in the future as well.
This is why we haven’t released officially yet. We expect users installing before the official release to pay attention to communication channels like this.
Going forward after release, we’ll try harder to avoid requiring manual action for anything, and consider some kind of notification mechanism if something important comes up.
Kernel with webcam support is available as kernel-16k-6.5.6-402.asahi.fc38.aarch64.
Even for installs which have appleh13camerad in all_firmware.tar.gz there might be a manual step required for now. If /lib/firmware/vendor/apple/ has no isp_*.dat files run sudo asahi-fwupdate and reboot.
This will break the camera support on M1 and M1 Pro/Max devices. A new kernel build fixing this issue is already underway. The same kernel should make the camera available to applications using pipewire for video capture.