libcamera camera not detected on RPi5 running image with new camera stack

[foosel]

The problem

1. Flash camera-streamer based image 2025.09.30.141704
2. Attach RPi Camera Module 3 to RPi5
3. Boot image on RPi5
4. Observe that rpicam-hello --list-cameras reports that no cameras can be found

Preliminary internet research proposed that installing the full rpicam-apps package vs. just rpicam-apps-lite would make things work. Alas, a quick image test build did not confirm that.

A manual full upgrade to all the latest package on the image made rpicam-hello finally report the camera, so something in one of the latest package fixes this. Alas, just running a full upgrade on the image build is out of the question as too many of the pre- and post-install scripts seem to depend on the underlying hardware architecture, which in a docker based update process differs from a real Pi just enough to cause problems.

On top of that, once the camera gets detected, we run into a blocking issue with camera-streamer not even supporting the RPi5 from what it looks like thanks to its utterly stupid lack of a hardware encoder, see ayufan/camera-streamer#149.

Proposed solution

Currently no clue how to solve this. Frankly, I'm getting to a point where I might just put a big fat warning about use of the quite mediocre RPi5 on the download page and leave it at that.

Additional information

No response

Verification

• [x] I'm a maintainer or collaborator of OctoPi-UpToDate and allowed to use this issue type