BlueZ

Yet another busy release. More than a hundred of commits for the Bluetooth subsystem will be in the upcoming kernel 3.0 release.

Those patches has the last bits for the Management Interface, By Johan  Hedberg. There should be things to fix and minor features to implement, especially about Bluetooth Low Energy, but the hard work is done.

Another big set of changes is in the L2CAP layer, where Gustavo Padovan is rewritten some parts of it to remove the socket dependence from the L2CAP core. This will help fix many issues in the RFCOMM layer and will help the AMP Manager implementation.

Szymon Janc worked in add Out Of Band Pairing Support to the Management Interface and to replace the kernel_thread() usage with the kthread API among other fixes.

There is also support for 16 digit PIN code in the Legacy Pairing, and lot of bug fixing and clean ups.

Last Monday Google announced the students accepted to take part in 2011 edition of Google Summer of Code. BlueZ this time got four slots. Our projects, and students, for this year are:

Improve EDS backend of Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP)
Student: Bartosz Szatkowski
Mentor: Claudio Takahasi

Nintendo Wii Remote Device Driver
Student: David Herrmann
Mentor: Gustavo Padovan

Implementing the Basic Imaging Profile(BIP)
Student: Jakub Adamek
Mentor: Vinicius Gomes

Implement the Video Distribution Profile(VDP)
Student: Prasad Bhat
Mentor: Luiz Augusto von Dentz

Besides the mentors, Johan Hedberg and Marcel Holtmann along with whole community will also support the students helping them with doubts and technical decisions. We expect to have a very productive summer, happy hacking to all students.

As many of you may already know Google announced the accepted organizations for Google Summer of Code and BlueZ[0] was accepted again! If you a student and know nothing about it go to the Google Summer of Code page[1] and learn about it.

We are already accepting projects proposal, check our ideas list[2] or propose some new good idea you want to implement in BlueZ. Discuss them with the BlueZ mentors and submit your project proposal. Our freenode irc channel for GSoC is #bluez-gsoc.

We will be very glad to accept the best students proposals to take part of GSoC 2011 with BlueZ.

[0] http://www.bluez.org
[1] http://code.google.com/soc/
[2] http://www.bluez.org/development/gsoc/gsoc-ideas-list/

On October 20th, Linus released the 2.6.36 kernel and one of the new features released with it was the support in the Linux Bluetooth stack
for the L2CAP Extended Features. Also called eL2CAP, the L2CAP Extended Features add some new features to the L2CAP layer, like the Enhanced
Retransmission Mode(ERTM), a reliable protocol with error and flow control; the Streaming Mode, an unreliable protocol for streaming purpouses; the
Frame Check Sequence, a checksum for each received packet; and Segmentation and Reassembly of L2CAP packets which make retransmission
easier. The L2CAP Extended Features were in the kernel before, but in an experimental mode and disabled by default.

Other Bluetooth changes in 2.6.36: In-kernel blacklist for incoming connections, that allow dropping selected incoming connections in
kernel space without having to wake up bluetoothd. Support for the Atheros AR300x chip. A new hci_recv_stream_fragment() function which is part of
a refactory in the HCI recv path to make the life of some drivers easier.

For this years Google Summer of Code we have 6 projects accepted that will hopefully extend the Bluetooth expierence for Linux a lot. So happy hacking to all students.

A couple of month ago, I announced my plans to close down the bluez-users and bluez-devel mailing lists on Sourceforge.net since they were causing more pain than doing any good.

As of today both mailing lists are disabled now. The archive still remains available, but from now on please use linux-bluetooth@vger.kernel.org for all kinds of BlueZ related emails. The new mailing list doesn’t require a subscription before you can post, but I advise everybody to subscribe to it. The volume on this mailing list is bearable and the spam ratio is almost zero thanks to the amazing admins at kernel.org.

With this change the BlueZ project is now free from Sourceforge.net

The 2.6.27 kernel goes into its final phase and is expected to be released really soon. I just created probably my last patch against the 2.6.26 kernel. It adds a quirk for the Bluetooth 2.1 based A-Link dongle and updates the btusb suspend/resume support.

patch-2.6.26-mh7.gz

To have a more transparent view of pending or development patches, I created the bluetooth-testing.git repository. It includes all patches that will be submitted during the next merge window. This tree is not stable and might be re-based at any time. So don’t depend on it.

The new Bluetooth 2.1 dongles from Targus and Belkin both need quirks to make them fully operational. This patch also includes a fix for a double free in the btusb and bpa10x drivers.

patch-2.6.26-mh6.gz