Surface Pro 7+: all three cameras working — including the IPU6 hardware ISP (PSYS) with Microsoft's own colour calibration #2253

After a long bring-up effort, all three cameras of the Surface Pro 7+ work on Linux (Ubuntu 24.04, linux-surface 6.19.8), and the front camera runs through the IPU6 hardware ISP (PSYS) — hardware denoise/LSC/sharpening at ~7% CPU — with the OEM .aiqb colour calibration extracted from Microsoft's public driver MSI. Colour measures within ~2% of Windows 11 rendering the same scene. As far as we know this is the first documented working PSYS pipeline on the mainline IPU6 driver.

Everything is reproducible from here (patches, DKMS packages, bridges, tuning tools, full playbook):
https://github.com/dmanresa-saes/surface-ipu6-cameras

Highlights for this community:

• The historic "IPU6 front camera works but is unusably noisy" problem is the full-resolution readout, not the sensor: the OV5693's 2x2-binned mode can be made to stream on IPU6 (per-mode MIPI PLL + analogue registers + vendor readout geometry from ov5693.sys). Analogue gain indoors drops from 127 (pinned max) to ~15.
• The IR camera's "all black" is simply the unlit illuminator — it hangs off the sensor's strobe pads, and nothing in ACPI describes it.
• Microsoft ships the Intel colour calibration for all three cameras in the public driver MSI; the repo includes a decoder for the CPFF/.aiqb format (Intel's own parser segfaults) and the black-level fix needed because mainline ISYS delivers RAW10 LSB-aligned while the tuning assumes Windows' 12-bit alignment.

Kernel patches are proposed as additions to the 6.19 cameras patchset in #2252; the HAL fixes needed for PSYS are in intel/ipu6-camera-hal#182. Updates also posted in #1702 (SP7+ tracker) and #2242 (the /dev/video0-63 native-app limit, which still applies).

Transparency note: this was done as an experiment in human-guided AI engineering — the hands-on reverse engineering and code were done by Anthropic's Claude working directly on the machine, with direction and hardware validation by a human. Details in the repo README.

Happy to answer questions or help test on other IPU6 Surface models (Pro 8/9, Go 4 — the method should transfer).