BlueZ

At the BlueZ developer meeting in Portland a few days ago, Claudio handed me another Broadcom dongle that needed some quirks to make it work. To my surprise I discovered that this is a Bluetooth 2.1 capable dongle. This was the first Bluetooth 2.1 capable dongle that I have seen that you can officially buy. Previously I was using CSR BlueCore4-External based dongles and flashed new firmware into it.

It is a Targus ACB10US. They are really nice since they are tiny. The box and their website still says it is only Bluetooth 2.0, but it seems they ran out of these chips and started putting 2.1 chips into it.

Claudio bought his one at Office Depot in Portland downtown, but they ran out of stock. Today they got a new shipment and just bought all of them. Now they are out of stock again

Also the Belkin F8T016 dongles have been reported as containing a Bluetooth 2.1 chip.

This patchset adds suspend and resume support to the USB driver. It also fixes a compiler warning and the link policy regression.

patch-2.6.26-mh5.gz

This patchset includes the final patches for the Simple Pairing support and with exactly this set of patches we passed all Bluetooth 2.1 qualification tests.

patch-2.6.26-mh4.gz

Yesterday the 29th of August 2008 was an historical day. BlueZ passed all Bluetooth 2.1 qualification tests for GAP. The bluez-4.2 release and an upcoming 2.6.27-mh1 kernel will pass all qualification tests form the Bluetooth 2.1 specification.

This is a testing that has been done with basically all PICS enabled. It would have been the full set of PICS, but two things have not been implemented by BlueZ right now:

• L2CAP flow control and retransmission (deprecated by a Core Addendum)
• RFCOMM support for sending RLS (receiving works)

Let me emphasize on this once more. Besides these two exception, BlueZ has passed all test cases required for a full Bluetooth 2.1 qualification. And this means full Simple Pairing support.

The qualification testing consisted of GAP, L2CAP, SDP, RFCOMM and SPP using the BITE test system. Everybody who has used the BITE before knows how much pain this system is and how broken it is. And every time they manage to break things while fixing others.

Just let me give you an example. So there is one test for checking a device in non-connectable mode (translates to page scan and inquiry scan off and hciconfig hci0 noscan for BlueZ) and with the latest test vectors it was impossible to pass this test. Even putting the device into a shielded box didn’t help. The test system still found it. Hey it even found our device after we took it out of the shielded box. This is one of the perfect example where the test system manfucturere didn’t validate their own system. Hey guys from AT4 wireless, you might wanna just run your test system against BlueZ.

The most famous failing test case is for testing park state support. For a host stack, it is impossible to fail this test since you can’t do anything wrong. You just simply can’t. Let me tell you that in the last 5 years we never passed that test case. So this time with a shielded box and the right star constellation, we finally did. Quite amazing and nobody of us really knows what we did different.

Did you ever tried to pass all (and I really mean all) SDP tests in one go. It is a nightmare and creating the right PIXIT settings for this takes quite some time. The main reason is that the SDP record editor that comes with the BITE is just plain braindead. I have the magic PIXIT values for doing a fully automated test run with BlueZ. However when re-importing them, the tester fails to import the ASCII string values. It just sets them to blank and you have to go into the CSV, read them and then put them in manually (again). Software validation at its glory. I did mention that this test system cost around 130.000 EUR and around 16.000 EUR in yearly fees!

So the bluez-4.2 release has been pushed out together with a bluez-gnome-1.2 to give you the nice Simple Pairing dialogs. The missing kernel patches will follow as soon as I have time to document them properly, but from 2.6.27-rc4 and later the major ones have been merged upstream already. If you are looking for Bluetooth 2.1 capable hardware, then the best bets are currently the EeePC 901 and the MacBooks. Go out and build Bluetooth 2.1 capable devices now.

And before I forget this, the qualification listing for this tests run has not been discussed yet. I will give an update when I know more details.

It seems Joao Paulo have been pretty busy lately working on GSoC project: bluetooth audio support for PulseAudio, and here is a preview of his work:

As you can see PulseAudio are now able to handle Bluetooth audio devices (A2DP and HSP). There are still some missing features that we want to add, a proper wizard on BlueZ to pair/connect those devices and some bugs which we should take care before releasing the code so don’t expect it to work flawless.

To test it run:

pulseaudio -L “module-bt-device name=<name> addr=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx profile=<a2dp,hsp> rate=<8000-48000> channels=<1,2>”

kudos to Joao Paulo and Lennart

The new btusb driver gets finally SCO over USB support. This allows the usage of mono headsets for VoIP calls.

patch-2.6.26-mh3.gz

It seems that commercial stack manufactures like to spread FUD (Fear, uncertainty and doubt) about BlueZ and its qualification status. Trying to eliminate the open source competition by telling customers that BlueZ can’t be qualified is just plain bad business practice and these companies are lying to you.

The truth is that BlueZ has been qualified according to the Bluetooth PRD 2.0 (and later) and has been used successful in products. The most prominent example is the Nokia N810 Internet tablet. It is based on the Maemo platform which includes BlueZ as one of its core components. If you don’t believe me, check the official qualification record by yourself.

To help qualifying BlueZ based products we split the qualification into components for the host stack (GAP, L2CAP, RFCOMM and SDP) and profile stack. Companies like Nokia, ACCESS, TomTom and others have sponsored the qualification of BlueZ components that can be re-used by others.

Current known qualification records can be found at the BlueZ qualification page and it is expected that are more products out there are using BlueZ and have successfully passed the Bluetooth qualification.

If there exist any questions when it comes to BlueZ qualification, feel free to mail me. You find my email address in the source code.

For Bluetooth USB devices, the current driver is called hci_usb. However the new btusb driver is suppose to take over. This update now makes sure that all quirks are also present in this new driver.

patch-2.6.26-mh2.gz

The missing piece in the btusb driver is the full SCO support. Oliver Neukum is working on this and I hope we will see an update soon.