Update: The driver actually managed to get squeezed in in 2.6.26-rc9.

According to a thread on the Linux uvcvideo driver mailing list if everything goes well we will see it included in the 2.6.27 kernel!

What is this uvcdriver and why is this great news? According to Wikipedia:

“The USB video device class (also USB video class or UVC) is a USB device class that describes devices capable of streaming video like webcams, digital camcorders, analog video converters, television tuners, and still-image cameras.”

So, yeah, uvcvideo is a driver for the above for Linux.

And this is great news, because:

1. UVC is a standard and according to a source from the mentioned thread it is required for Microsoft Vista certification, so hardware vendors “have to” implement.
2. It means out of the box support for all those standard-compliant webcams, which is pretty much all of the webcams integrated in laptops it seems. Also most new USB webcams(?).
3. 100+ webcams are already reported to work out of the box and probably twice as much work as well, but aren’t reported to the author of the driver.

Kudos to Laurent Pinchart the main developer of uvcdriver.