I have previously written about the HP Zbook Ultra G1a, which includes the incredible AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) processor.

The combination of a 16-core processor with 128GB DDR5 memory and a beautiful, high-resolution, high-refresh-rate OLED display is a compelling one, especially when packaged as a compact 14-inch laptop.

In my opinion, it is the only laptop on the market that comes close to the Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch.

The full specification can be found below.

  • AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 3GHz Base / 5.1GHz Boost (16C/32T)
  • 128GB LPDDR5x-8000 Unified Memory
  • AMD Radeon 8060S Graphics (40 Graphics Cores)
  • 2TB M.2 2280 TLC NVM-e SSD
  • MediaTek Wi-Fi 7 MT7925 (Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4)
  • 2x Thunderbolt 4, 1x USB-C, 1x USB-A, HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm Headphone
  • 14-inch OLED Display (2880x1800 @ 120Hz)

In addition to the exceptional hardware, the HP Zbook Ultra G1a also works great with Linux. The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 has excellent support out of the box, with one exception.

The webcam uses the AMD ISP4 (Image Signal Processor Generation 4) hardware block, designed to handle advanced camera processing. Unfortunately, following multiple delays, the AMD ISP4 is not natively compatible with Linux. Support has been teased on more than one occasion but has not made it to a production release.

Thankfully, the community has come to the rescue, specifically “jtsiros” who developed a simple script that downloads and builds the patch series, with support for Arch, Debian and Fedora based distributions.

I did have an issue building the patch series on Fedora 43. However, I was able to resolve the issue via a simple tweak to the version number. A new forked repository can be found below.

To install on Fedora, simply download the repository and navigate to the directory within the Terminal.

From within the directory, run the following commands:

sudo dnf install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc make b4
make install


The webcam should now be enabled.

You will need to run the ‘make install’ command each time the kernel is updated. Therefore, I recommend keeping the files local.

hardware hp zbook_ultra_g1a amd ryzen amd_ryzen_ai_Max+_395 amd_ryzen_ai_Max+_pro_395 radeon radeon_890 strix_halo image_signal_processor isp4 webcam linux fedora debian arch operating_system