Re: Webcamd future

On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 3:37 PM Kurt Jaeger <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > What are relations to
> > Linux kernel that you mentioned? How this can be avoided?
>
> If I understand it correctly, webcamd at https://github.com/hselasky/webcamd
> was started as a user-space daemon that provides Linux USB Kernel
> functions, so that relevant Linux-based webcam drivers can somehow
> be integrated.
>
> At least that's how HPS announced it in 2010:
>
> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-usb/2010-January/008069.html

Yeah. It resides in the userland because of GPLv2 license, so it
cannot be just copy-pasted into the new in-kernel webcam code which
must be BSD licensed. Also because it supports ~1500 devices the
rewrite may not be feasible?

https://github.com/hselasky/webcamd:
"""
Introduction

Webcamd is a small daemon that enables about 1500 different USB based
webcam, DVB and remote control USB devices under the FreeBSD operating
system. The webcam daemon is basically an application which is a port
of Linux USB drivers into userspace on FreeBSD. The daemon currently
depends on libc, pthreads, libusb and libcuse.
Licensing

Webcamd is GPLv2 licensed due to the external Linux part which is
GPLv2, though some files inside the webcamd remains BSD licensed which
allows for building similar BSD licensed daemons.
"""

Because "daemon currently depends on libc, pthreads, libusb and
libcuse" there is not much kernel involved right? Except the Linux
kernel is a moving target so the copy-paste into webcamd may not
always be trivial :-P

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info